The president of the Saudi National Bank, Credit Suisse’s main shareholder, said this Thursday that the “panic” surrounding the Swiss bank is “unjustified” and that there have never been any talks between the two entities about the need for “aid” to the European bank.
In an interview with CNBC in Riyadh, which is hosting the second edition of the Financial Sector Conference, the entity’s president, Ammar al-Khudairy, said this fall in the banking sector is “panic, a little bit of panic”.
“I think it’s totally unfair, neither for Credit Suisse nor for the entire market,” he said.
“If you look at how the entire banking sector went down, unfortunately a lot of people were just looking for excuses,” al-Khudairy said.
The comments come hours after Credit Suisse announced it had borrowed 50 billion Swiss francs (about $54 billion) from the Swiss central bank to “pre-emptively bolster liquidity”.
The head of Saudi Arabia’s largest commercial bank reiterated it would not take its stake beyond the current 9.9%, something al-Khudairy said on Wednesday that caused the institution’s shares to plummet.
“There were no discussions with Credit Suisse about providing aid (…) I don’t know where the word ‘aid’ comes from, there has been no discussion since October,” he said.
Al-Khudairy added that the recent fallout from the Silicon Valley Bank collapse was different from that of the 2008 financial crisis, saying that the measures taken by U.S. regulators to protect depositors had eased new fears of contagion. had taken away.
“Last week we had an outage, but it’s nowhere close and has nothing to do with what we saw in 2008. This is an isolated incident, the regulators have ruled out any possibility of contagion,” he said .
Credit Suisse had its darkest trading day on Wednesday after it was revealed to be at credit risk, losing a quarter of its market value and its shares plummeting to a low of less than two Swiss francs, the lowest in its 167-year history. .
Source: DN
