The Swiss banking giant UBS, already hit hard by the global finance crisis, is facing new problems connected to the collapse of Bernard Madoff's private US investment fund, the firm confirmed Monday, dpa reported.
UBS spokeswoman Tatiana Togni, answering a question about the involvement, said UBS had brokered access to the fund if clients asked for the contact, but did not directly recommend it.
She did not give details about the amount of capital involved.
All told, Swiss investors had put about 6 billion dollars into Madoff's investment fund, the daily Neue Zuercher Zeitung reported Sunday.
Madoff, 70, a former chairman of the Nasdaq exchange on Wall Street, was arrested earlier this month for running a 50-billion- dollar Ponzi scheme in which money from new investors was used to pay off older investors.
The FBI has taken agents off the anti-terrorism beat to investigate this and other escalating Wall Street swindles, David Cardona, a top FBI official in New York, told Bloomberg financial news service.
"We have to work those cases which we think pose the greatest threat," he said. "In this case, its a threat to the financial system and Wall Street."
Madoff last week was placed under house arrest and must wear a tracking device - an arrangement guaranteed by Madoff's wife, who said she would give up two of her homes if he were to attempt to escape.
UBS invested its own money with Madoff through the Luxalpha Gelder funds, but did not put Madoff on any of the lists it recommended to clients for direct investments, Togni said.
Media reports in Switzerland said that another private Swiss bank, the Union Bancaire Privee (UBP,) had invested 1 per cent of the capital it managed in Madoff. Other Swiss banks with funds invested at Madoff included Reichmuth Bank of Lucern, Swiss news agency SDA reported. Hedge funds like Swiss Life also had invested with Madoff.
The Ponzi plot, such as that run by Madoff, is named after Charles Ponzi, a 19th-century Italian immigrant to the US who was responsible for one of the biggest frauds in US history. The name is now commonly used to describe pyramid-selling schemes where people pay into a programme that does not exist.
The top official in charge of watching over US stock markets, Christopher Cox, has admitted that his agency had failed to act for nearly a decade on suspicions concerning the dealings.
US president-elect Barack Obama has named Mary Shapiro, who currently leads the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, an arm of the SEC, to replace Cox and restore the tarnished reputation of the regulator, which has also come under sharp criticism for failing to foresee the massive financial crisis striking US and world banks.