UBS Group AG failed to persuade a US judge to modify a 1999 legal settlement about claims against Swiss banks over their handling of Nazi victims during the Holocaust.
US District Judge Edward Korman turned aside the bank's request to release it from fresh claims for financial restitution based on new revelations about Nazi-linked accounts. Korman presided over the $1.25 billion accord in which UBS and other banks expected protection from all new future financial claims.
UBS has been locked in a dispute in federal court in Brooklyn, New York with the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a US-based group known for its pursuit of Nazis, that the bank said could expose it to billions of dollars in new financial claims for its wartime business with the Third Reich.
UBS had argued that the 1990s accord in which the company and other Swiss banks settled the claims of Nazi victims covered it from any potential further liability -- known or unknown at the time. UBS acquired Credit Suisse in 2023.
At a hearing before Korman in March, UBS attorney David Burns said the bank wanted a clarification from the judge about the accord to block the Wiesenthal center from suing for more money and to bar the organization from publicly discussing any findings about Nazi assets. In a ruling on Tuesday, Korman said there is no lawsuit or motion before him, and he can't issue an advisory opinion.
The case is 96-cv-04849, US District Court, Eastern District of New York, Brooklyn.
The Air Force airmen rescued from Iran by an armada of helicopters, other aircraft and commandos used a standard issue Boeing Co. communications device to alert their comrades and signal their locations, according to a service official.
"They have a very sophisticated beeper-type apparatus that is on them at all time," President Donald Trump said Monday at a wide-ranging White House news conference about the complex weekend operation.
"When they go out on these missions, they make sure they have lots of battery space and they're in good shape, and this one worked really well -- amazingly, saved his life," Trump said of the communications device and the missing airman who the president said had taken refuge "in the treacherous mountains of Iran."
That device is the Boeing Combat Survivor Evader Locator, or CSEL, said the Air Force official. The Air Force and Navy have bought thousands of the hand-held unit since it became fully operational in 2009. The evader locator "provides secure two-way over-the-horizon, near real time data communications, precise military Global Positioning System, and increased radio frequencies and modes of communications over existing radios," according to a Navy fact sheet.
Stranded personnel can send a data message via satellite to a central rescue center. The center forwards that message to rescue forces, who then communicate with the survivor via voice communications to help with recovery, according a Pentagon test report. In this case, the Pentagon's Joint Personnel Recovery Center coordinated the effort.
Earlier: US Rescues Missing Airman as Iran Strikes Gulf Arab States
More than 50,000 of the devices had been delivered, as of 2011, the latest public Air Force accounting.
The multi-function handset was crucial to locating the two-man crew after their F-15E warplane was hit by what Trump called a "lucky shot" from a shoulder-fired missile.
A massive rescue effort got underway "following confirmation of active rescue beacons," General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Monday. The plane's pilot -- call sign Dude 44 Alpha -- was rescued Friday in a daylight operation.
The F-15E's weapons system operator, call sign Dude 44 Bravo, although badly injured "continued to work and survive" to evade capture as the US used "every means available," with the assistance of the Central Intelligence Agency, to locate his precise location, Caine said.
"Thanks to our interagency partners, we were able to get eyes on his location and positively ID him," Caine added. He was rescued Saturday night so that "at midnight 12 local Eastern time, Easter Sunday, more than 50 hours after the start of this operation," both airmen were back in friendly territory, the general said.
In the hunt for Dude 44 Bravo, the CIA "deployed both human assets and exquisite technologies that no intelligence service in the world possesses to a daunting challenge comparable to hunting for a single grain of sand in the middle of a desert," the agency's director, John Ratcliffe told reporters.
"On Saturday morning, we achieved our primary objective by finding and providing confirmation that one of America's best and bravest was alive and concealed in a mountain crevice, still invisible to the enemy but not to the CIA," Ratcliffe said.