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UBS has agreed to pay €835mn in fines and damages to settle a long-running French tax evasion case that involved its bankers using “James Bond”-like tactics, a fraction of the original €4.5bn penalty.
The Swiss bank said on Tuesday that it would pay a fine of €730mn and €105mn in civil damages to the French state after the lender was found guilty of helping rich clients evade paying tax between 2004 and 2012.
The settlement represents less than a fifth of the penalty handed down to UBS in 2019 following a six-week criminal trial, after initial settlement talks collapsed. Years of appeals and court interventions ensued.
The 2019 ruling was itself the result of a seven-year investigation by French authorities where the bank was accused of using tactics likened by lawyers to a James Bond movie to solicit clients illegally and help them launder money.
Prosecutors argued that UBS bankers had used self-erasing hard drives, business cards without logos and evasive tactics to move about France in secret to enlist clients illegally at glamorous corporate events.
Whistleblowers alleged that UBS bankers solicited clients during hunting trips, at operas and at the French Open tennis tournament. UBS argued that while its bankers did go to France and attended social events, prosecutors lacked evidence of the solicitation.
The bank’s appeals ultimately reached the French Supreme Court, which in 2023 confirmed a lower court’s decision that found UBS guilty of unlawful client solicitation and aggravated money laundering. But it referred the financial penalty and civil damages to be reassessed, which at that point had already been whittled down to €1.8bn, an amount UBS was still contesting.
The French state originally proposed a total penalty of €5.3bn in 2019, but the judge ordered the bank pay €4.5bn, which consisted of a then-record fine of €3.7bn and an additional €800mn in damages.
UBS said: “The resolution of this legacy case is in line with UBS’s intention to resolve such matters in the best interests of all its stakeholders.”
UBS added that it was fully provisioned for the penalties it has agreed to pay.
It marks the latest settlement of a legal dispute for UBS, which is contending with several long-running cases inherited from Credit Suisse, which it acquired in 2023.
UBS last month agreed to pay $300mn to resolve a legacy Credit Suisse case in the US related to the mis-selling of residential mortgage-backed securities in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis.
In May, UBS also agreed to pay more than $500mn following an investigation into how Credit Suisse helped wealthy Americans hide more than $4bn from authorities by the US Department of Justice.
