It's not the best way to start the new year, but according to Swiss papers, the Swiss National Bank's (SNB) president Philipp Hildebrand and his wife Kashya were at the centre of an insider-trading allegation.
Hildebrand has since been cleared after a double investigation. According to media reports and domestic Swiss papers:
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On 23 December 2011, the SNB said:
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But the plot thickens. According to Switzerland's NZZ Online and SonntagsZeitung, Christoph Blocher, Swiss People's Party (SVP) vice-president, an opponent of Hildebrand, has:
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However, his spokesperson has not confirmed the information and has since told Swiss journalists that the "papers had been remarkably well informed by both the federal authorities and Hildebrand himself".
Hildebrand is a member of the board of directors of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, as well as vice-chairman of the Financial Stability Board (FSB) as of early November.
The two newspapers' accusation of Blocher tipping off the government has been met with wider suspicion in Switzerland, as the government has yet to confirm or deny whether he was the informant – and we seriously doubt whether a government would name the whistleblower.
However, there is a good digest here - courtesy of World Radio Switzerland.
Blocher, a 71-year old chemicals industrialist billionaire, has made a controversial name for himself after his right-wing SVP launched a central campaign to their party in 2007 that:
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The United Nations has dubbed the campaign as "racist". His controversial stature has also apparently led to more than 1,000 subscribers of the popular Swiss newspaper Basler Zeitung leaving the publication, after it was revealed that the paper is owned by the Blocher family.
In September, Blocher called for Switzerland to prohibit commercial banks from investment banking after UBS revealed it had lost more than $2 billion from the alleged rogue-trading scandal.