Biography|Sergio Ermotti — The Second Tenure Began in St. Jakobshalle

On 5 April 2023 UBS held its annual general meeting at St. Jakobshalle in Basel. It was the first AGM since the emergency purchase of Credit Suisse sixteen days earlier.

It was also the first day of Sergio Ermotti's second term as Group CEO.

The board had named him on 29 March 2023, effective this date, after the AGM. He replaced Ralph Hamers. The SEC filing and the UBS news release both use 5 April 2023 as the start.

UBS's own archive records the meeting at 10.00 a.m. CEST in St. Jakobshalle. CNBC counted 1,128 shareholders in the hall.

The arena stands at St. Jakobs-Strasse 390. It sits on Münchenstein ground, just over the Basel-Stadt line, next to St. Jakob-Park. The city of Basel owns it. The official venue of the meeting was still Basel.

Ermotti had left the bank on 1 November 2020 after nine years and had been chairman of Swiss Re from April 2021. The Credit Suisse rescue pulled him back.

The 29 March release said the board chose him because of the new priorities after the planned acquisition. He remained Swiss Re chairman through that company's AGM on 12 April, then stepped down.

This hall is not a bank. It is a sports and congress box that happens to be where the combined bank's shareholders sat on the day the new CEO's contract began.

A visitor finds a renovated arena, opened in 1976 and rebuilt between 2015 and 2018, used for tennis, concerts, and company meetings. It is public on event days.

The first tenure started with a trading-loss resignation in Zurich. The second started with a state-brokered merger, in this room, on a Wednesday morning in April.

Photo: St. Jakobshalle, Basel, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: UBS Group picture collection, Sergio P. Ermotti, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.