The "able & intelligent" ex-UBS banker with 2 ex-wives & £133m in assets
UBS bankers may not be having the best 2025, but the Swiss bank didn't pay badly in 2024, when bonuses for managing directors there were at their highest for four years. Even if you earned $2.2m (£1.6m) for your toil at UBS last year, though, you'd still be a long way off the accumulated wealth of UBS bankers from before the financial crisis.
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The newly released judgement in the court case between ex-UBS CFO Clive Standish and his ex-wife, Anna Standish, is a case study in how to make - and keep - money through the travails of a long financial services career.
Standish spent 32 years in banking, starting at Rothschild in 1975 and ending at UBS in 2007. In 1999, he was appointed chair and CEO of UBS Asia Pacific. In 2002, he joined the UBS Group Executive Board in 2002. In 2003, he was appointed UBS Chief Financial Officer.
During this illustrious career, the judgement says Standish earned "very large sums of money." Between 2004 and 2007 alone, he earned $40m gross. By 2004, Standish already had £57m of assets, worth £155m at 2022 values. Those assets included various bank accounts and investments, plus a 6,005 hectare farm in Australia, 4,405 commercial cattle, 511 stud cattle, and 5,790 sheep... In 2010, he bought a family home in England for £9.6m and spent at least £2.5m renovating it. That alone is now worth £21m+.
Standish met his second wife in 2003, shortly after divorcing his first wife, with whom he had three children and to whom he'd been married for 24 years. His second wife was 15 years his junior, but reportedly found Standish to be “an immensely able and intelligent man.”
Standish and his second wife have been dragging their affairs through the UK courts because, after they divorced in 2004, she wanted to keep half the £80m he'd transferred to her to avoid paying £32m in inheritance tax.
The court ruled today that she can't keep that money, which it said was to set up trusts for the children. Instead, she must make do with £25m, while Standish gets to keep £107m of his assets that remain.
Standish is a lesson in keeping wealth throughout the ups and downs of multiple marriages and a long financial services career. The judgement notes that during his most lucrative period of employment at UBS, he received a "a large proportion" of his earnings in deferred shares and options "on which he said he paid 80% tax upfront." These lost all their value in the 2008 banking crisis.
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