Martin Ebner (banker)

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Martin Mauritius Ebner (born August 12, 1945 ) is a Swiss banker and investor from the municipality of Freienbach in the canton of Schwyz .

Career

Martin Ebner grew up in Hurden near Pfäffikon SZ . He studied in Zurich Law , graduated with a law degree. graduated with magna cum laude and then studied at the University of Florida Business Administration (PhD).

Before Ebner founded his own bank, BZ Bank Zurich (now BZ Bank ), in 1985 , he worked at Schweizerische Kreditanstalt (now Credit Suisse ) and at Bank Vontobel . At BZ Bank he was CEO until the end of 2000. Since then, he has focused on managing the various interests he holds in public and private companies.

Ascent

In 1988 Ebner founded BZ Gruppe Holding Aktiengesellschaft. In addition to BZ Bank, their holdings included BZ Trust Aktiengesellschaft, an asset management company, as well as controlling majorities in the four investment companies founded by Ebner and traded on the stock exchange (BK Vision, Pharma Vision , Stillhalter Vision, Specialty Vision). In the press, they were occasionally referred to as Ebner's “Visions” after their common name. In the course of time there were also significant investments in various public companies and private companies, including Asea Brown Boveri , Credit Suisse Group , Alusuisse and Lonza Group, and Intershop Holding .

Ebner relied on stocks as the most promising investment category in the long term. He also tried, in the interests of shareholder value, to influence the management of the companies in which he invested and in whose supervisory bodies he partly took a seat. He also called for a downsizing of the supervisory bodies and a remuneration of the management, which is based not only on the profit of a company, but also on the risk. In order to enforce his shareholder rights, Ebner also took legal action in individual cases, in particular the proceedings against the members of the Board of Directors of the then Swiss Bank Corporation ( UBS ) and the company itself became known.

Through aggressive advertising, Ebner also tried to win small investors as customers for BZ Bank and introduced the “BZ share account” for them.

The politician Christoph Blocher is counted among Ebner's closest friends . He also shares directorships with him .

In 2001 the business magazine Bilanz estimated his fortune at 4 to 5 billion francs, in 2014 at 1.250 billion francs.

crisis

The creeping decline of BZ Gruppe Holding began with the months of sharp price falls on the international stock exchanges after the bursting of the Internet bubble in 2000/2001 and the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 . The BZ Group, including the investment companies it manages, were hit disproportionately by the bear market due to the concentration on a few investments. A standstill agreement concluded with the lending banks in the summer of 2002 enabled the BZ Group to continue to exist. However, Ebner was forced to sell the majority of his holdings or assign them to the banks. This also affected controlling majorities in the vision companies, which passed to the Zürcher Kantonalbank .

The BZ Group retained a majority stake in the listed property company Intershop as its main stake . The core of the BZ Group, BZ Bank, was separated from the BZ Group in the spring of 2003 by Martin Ebner and his wife Rosmarie, together with the management board members Alfred Böni and Ralph Stadler, and have been managed separately since then.

recreation

Since the end of the standstill agreement with the lending banks in July 2003, BZ Gruppe Holding has recovered. In 2005 the parent company of the group changed its name to Patinex AG and has operated under this company ever since. In the same year, Patinex acquired 12.5 percent of the reinsurer Converium and thus played a decisive role in the - initially hostile - takeover of Converium by the French reinsurance group SCOR . With a stake of around 8 percent, Ebner was the largest shareholder in SCOR via Patinex until the sale of the stake in spring 2015. The share in Intershop is around 33 percent today. Patinex's other disclosed investments include the Swiss listed companies Myriad , Temenos and Vifor Pharma . In the unlisted area, Patinex holds, among others, a larger stake in the Geneva immunology company NovImmune.

In 2006, Patinex took over the Swiss airline Helvetic Airways and the associated flight school Horizon Swiss Flight Academy.

literature

Filmography

  • L'expérience Blocher , documentar, 2013.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Ebner has to sell his visions. NZZ, August 2, 2002 "
  2. Jump up ↑ Interview with Martin Ebner, Saturday Rundschau, DRS 1 , April 12, 1997
  3. ↑ The 300 richest 2014: Martin Ebner. In: Bilanz , December 2014
  4. ↑ Disclosure of participations ( memento of the original from July 31, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. SIX Swiss Exchange - Significant shareholders (link no longer valid) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.six-swiss-exchange.com
personal data
SURNAME Ebner, Martin
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ebner, Martin Mauritius (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss banker, stock exchange trader and financier
DATE OF BIRTH August 12, 1945