Marcel Ospel, chairman of UBS, the sixth-largest bank in the world by market capitalization, may be feeling unfairly tarred these days. In his ten years at the helm, Ospel has turned UBS into Switzerland’s undisputed market leader in retail banking while also making it a global powerhouse in wealth management and investment banking. But the UBS boss is the villain in a new Swiss docudrama, Grounding -- The Last Days of Swissair.
One of the biggest box-office hits in Swiss cinema history, the film opened in January and mixes news footage and interviews with fictionalized scenes to recount the events that led to the financial collapse of national icon Swissair in October 2001. In the film an ice-cold, chain-smoking Ospel, played by Swiss actor Gilles Tschudi, condemns his country’s revered symbol of punctuality to the dustheap; along the way he humiliates Lukas Mühlemann, then-chairman of Switzerland’s second-largest bank, Credit Suisse. Ospel refuses the airline, which had debts of about $10.6 billion, further credit, even though Mühlemann, the film implies, would have supported a bailout. In the film the Ospel character is motivated by the promise that he can become chief banker to a new airline, Swiss, which did indeed replace the venerable Swissair, only to be sold with heavy debts to Lufthansa last year.
“This [film’s] thesis does not hold water,” a disgruntled Ospel told Swiss magazine Blick, asserting that Swissair was “a money-destroying machine.” But Ospel won’t be suing the filmmakers for libel. A UBS spokesman tells Institutional Investor that even though UBS believes the film’s “interpretation is false,” the bank “recognizes the artistic freedom of the director and the producer and therefore will not take legal action.” Ospel himself would not comment.
Grounding director Michael Steiner figures that Ospel should be flattered by his portrayal in the film. “His movie character disturbs many people because it shows Ospel as an economic man above all else,” Steiner tells II. “But from a UBS banker’s standpoint, all his decisions in the film are the right ones. Moreover, the film demonstrates that when Ospel decides to put a plan into action, he moves faster and smarter than everybody else.”
Clearly, Steiner has a certain respect for Ospel’s bank: He and executive producer Peter-Christian Fueter tried to get financing from UBS for the Sf4.2 million ($3.2 million) film in 2004. They were turned down. “It would have been a much better investment than the one they made in Swissair,” notes Steiner.
