Close on the heels of the first quarterly net profit in five quarters posted by the Zurich, Switzerland-based UBS AG, Andreas Kern, a spokesman for the bank has informed that the bank will pay out 34 percent more in bonuses for
2009.

As a result, while the 2008 bonus payments to the bank’s staff, excluding US brokers, stood at 2.16 billion Swiss francs; the variable pay amount for 2009 will go up to 2.9 billion Swiss francs.

In addition, Kern also revealed that the UBS is booking 3 billion francs in costs for 2009 bonuses, vis-à-vis the earlier year’s 1.7 billion francs, largely because of accounting changes introduced by the bank.

While the UBS paid bonuses amounting to 9.92 billion francs in 2007, its 2008 bonuses were slashed a whopping 78 percent, after it reported a 21.3 billion francs net loss. That year, the bank received a 6 billion-franc lifeline from the Swiss government for facilitating the process of spinning off its toxic assets into a central bank fund.

However, ever since Oswald Gruebel joined in as the bank’s CEO a year back, he vowed to stick to a policy of paying market-level compensation. Last year, UBS boosted the senior bankers’ salaries at its securities division by an average of 50 percent so as to raise the ratio of fixed pay.