The Swiss bank's incoming chief lawyer is no stranger to high-stakes cases.
Barbara Levi isn't a big fan of multi-tasking. «I now realize that it is such as a waste of time, you end up in doing many things, without adding value to any,» she told a legal outlet last autumn. The Italian-born lawyer prefers to allot her time issue-for-issue.
In November, she takes a job overseeing a caseload which includes cleaning up UBS' offshore wealth dealings as well as allegedly mis-selling mortgage securities in the run-up to the 2008/09 financial crisis. Rio Tinto, where she currently oversees legal matters, hired Levin last year for her anti-corruption expertise. She leaves the miner less than two years into the job.
Long-Running Battles
What Rio Tinto and UBS have in common is some of the longest-running, most complicated legal cases in business. The Swiss bank's current legal overseer, Markus Diethelm, has spent the bulk of his 13-year tenure extricating UBS from a high-stakes French criminal investigation (he isn't done just yet – the ruling is due in September).
The most delicate issue is a criminal probe in the Netherlands against UBS CEO Ralph Hamers. Dutch prosecutors were ordered to revisit a 2017 settlement and re-investigate Hamers, in a case fostered by a 78-year-old Dutch activist.
African Spotlight
The British-Australian miner is at the center of a 13-year-old fight for Simandou in southeastern Guinea, which holds the world's largest reserves of untapped iron ore. A Swiss criminal court in January found diamond and mining magnate Beny Steinmetz guilty of corruption over Simandou, where Rio Tinto had lost its concession.
Under Levi, the miner last summer was negotiating a settlement with Britain's anti-fraud office, the SFO, to escape prosecution, according to the «Financial Times» (behind paywall). It said in its 2020 annual report that Rio Tinto it is cooperating with authorities looking into allegations a consultant to the Simandou project was paid $10.5 million in 2011.
Kept Awake At Night
An U.S. lawsuit over alleged fraud in its coal business in Mozambique represents another case which has run more than a decade. Levi is no stranger to struggles: she told the legal outlet that she didn't speak English when she moved to the U.S. more than 20 years ago.
Of her many challenging career moments, the ones «that really kept me (and still do) up at night are matters that relate to people,» she said.
