Bloomberg – Union Bancaire Privee, the Swiss hedge-fund investor whose clients lost about $700 million with Bernard Madoff, plans to cut 10 percent of its workforce this year after assets under management declined.

“UBP should reduce its staff by 10 percent over the course of the year, from a headcount of 1,372 at the end of December, through redundancies, early retirements and not filling vacant positions,” said Jerome Koechlin, spokesman for the Geneva- based firm.

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Tags: bernard madoff, client assets, fund-investor, geneva, investor, koechlin, union bancaire privee

Bloomberg – Banque Safdie SA, the Geneva-based wealth manager that withdrew money invested with Bernard Madoff three years before his alleged Ponzi scheme unraveled, said the scandal will mean more hedge fund regulation.

“What Madoff has done is highlight the lack of regulation,” Safdie Chief Executive Officer Claude Le Ber said in an interview from Geneva this week. “There’s going to be a shake out. Even before Madoff, the hedge fund industry was seeing redemptions and wasn’t producing absolute returns.”

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