The suspension was put in place to protect investors, according to the bank. UBS Wealth Management has frozen its $6-billion Global Property Fund because it couldn't keep up clients' requests to have their money back, according to a report -- since confirmed by UBS -- in the Swiss newspaper Neue Zuercher Zeitung.

Later

The real-estate fund will remain frozen -- meaning that no one will be able to withdraw funds -- until the end of 2009 "due to the strained liquidity situation in the market as a whole and the longer process for selling real estate," UBS told Reuters. "In such a situation it is a fund manager's responsibility to temporarily suspend the fund in the best interest [of] all investors," a UBS spokeswoman added.

UBS' launched its Global Property Fund in 2004. In December 2006, FinanceAsia magazine mentioned it -- "a strategic real estate offering for investors looking for diversification from traditional asset classes through exposure to physical properties globally" -- an example in the "Listed Real Estate" category of one of the "10 most successful investment strategies" for that year. Last month the NAREIT Index, a measure of U.S. real-estate investment trust performance, index was 48.3% off its standing in November 2007. The S8P 500 was down 39.5% through the same period.

The UBS fund was open only to private investors with at least $1 million in investable assets. A typical allocation to the fund was 2% to7% of an investor's overall market-invested assets, according to UBS.

Zurich-based UBS reported $41.38 billion in client outflows in this year's third quarter. -FWR

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