Edgar de Picciotto

Origins and early life

Edgar de Picciotto was born in Beirut on 4 June 1929 into one of the great Sephardic families of the Levant: the Picciottos, Jews of Portuguese origin who had settled in Livorno and then, in the eighteenth century, in Aleppo, where Raphael Picciotto became consul of Austria in 1784 and where, for four generations, the family held the consulates of a dozen European states, ennobled by the Habsburgs; a cousin, Joseph de Picciotto Bey, was the first Jew appointed to the Egyptian senate. Edgar was raised in Beirut, and Jewish by birth and family — the fact on which this fiche rests.

Work and career

Trained in Paris and in the banks of the Middle East, he moved to Geneva in 1955 and in 1969 founded his own bank, the Compagnie de Banque et d'Investissements, which in 1990, after absorbing the TDB-American Express Bank, became the Union Bancaire Privée, UBP. He was one of the first Swiss bankers to take his clients into hedge funds and alternative investments, in the 1970s, when the profession thought them reckless, and built UBP into one of the largest private banks in Switzerland, with more than a hundred billion francs under management; this fiche also records that the bank's exposure to Bernard Madoff's fraud in 2008 cost its clients heavily, and that it repaid a part of the loss.

A collector of art and a patron of the Jewish community of Geneva, he passed the bank to his children and died in Geneva on 13 March 2016, at eighty-six.