Julius Baer Group Ltd. plans to buy back as much as $524 million of shares after full-year profit declined 9.3%.
Bloomberg reports that the 121-year old Swiss wealth manager reported Monday that net income fell to $368 million in 2010 from $406 million a year earlier. The private bank plans to repurchase as much as 5% of its outstanding shares by its annual shareholder meeting next year.
The news comes on the heels of Feb. 4 report that a former Julius Baer Group Ltd. employee handed over stolen client data to WikiLeaks, which has once-again exposed Swiss banking secrecy.
In that report, Bloomberg says Rudolf Elmer, who worked for Zurich-based Baer's Cayman Islands unit until December 2002, was detained by Swiss prosecutors after handing over data on about 2,000 cross-border accounts to WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange on Jan. 17.
