Total cuts of 5,000 additional to 2,000 redundancies already in the works. Zurich-based UBS plans to cut about 5,000 senior positions worldwide over the next month or two, according to the Swiss weekly newspaper SonntagsZeitung. About half of the jobs will come out of the bank's wealth-management operations, which now accounts for 65% of UBS' workforce of about 77,000.

A week ago, UBS said it was trimming some senior management in the course of re-cutting its operating structure from eight global regions to four. But it lumped those redundancies with the 2,000 job cuts it last month said it had in mind to make by mid year 2009.

Plus last month's 2,000

The latest round of cuts seems to be in addition to the 2,000 positions UBS last month said it had in mind to make by mid-year 2009.

UBS has lost money and prestige over the past two years as a result making bad bets on risky U.S.-real-estate-related investments. And, as a result of its role in helping some wealthy U.S. citizens and resident aliens evade U.S. taxation, it has agreed to pay the U.S. government a fine of $780 million -- and may have to cope with changes to Swiss private-banking regulations that make it and other Swiss banks less attractive to foreigners as tax havens.

In the far east, UBS is sending its Singapore-based head of wealth-management operations for southeastern Asia Tee Fong Seng to Hong Kong where he'll lead a "key clients competency center" as a report to Hong Kong wealth-management chief Allen Lo -- in Lo's new capacity as head of wealth management for Asia, says Reuters.

Christine Ong, UBS Wealth Management head for Taiwan, has been tapped to replace Tee in Singapore. -FWR