mar, 26 mars 2024
The legal dispute over UBS’s CS acquisition terms faces a delay as SASV secures a three-month extension.
A lawsuit filed by investors against UBS over the financial terms of the CS takeover at the Zurich Commercial Court will not enter the next round until the end of August.
The Swiss Investor Protection Association (SASV) has been granted an extension of three months. The SASV now has until August 28, 2024 to submit a reply to UBS’s response, the association announced on Monday evening.
This was “a short deadline”, explained the SASV in the communiqué. It had therefore applied for an extension. Prior to this, at the end of 2023, the UBS lawyers had already been granted an extension of several weeks to submit their response.
In mid-February, the Zurich Commercial Court consolidated all of the lawsuits filed by investors into a single proceeding. At the time, SASV explained that this concerned a total of over 30 lawsuits.
SASV is representing around 1,500 small CS shareholders with its lawsuit. Other plaintiffs include the legal startup Legalpass, which claims to represent more than 3,000 shareholders. With their “class actions”, they want to achieve better compensation for the CS shares sold to UBS.
As part of the takeover, Credit Suisse shareholders received 1 UBS share for 22.48 Credit Suisse shares. At the time the transaction was announced on March 19, 2023, this corresponded to a purchase price of around CHF 3 billion for Credit Suisse as a whole.
However, on the last trading day before the announcement, CS was valued at CHF 7 billion on the stock market, which was more than twice as high.
Are these investors entitled to more? While it is unclear how the court proceedings will play out, this extension for the SASV proves at least a peripheral interest of the courts to hear out the grievances of the class action lawsuits.
©Keystone/SDA
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