The 1980s saw the global economy gripped by a new wave of globalisation. The dismantling of tariff barriers, the liberalisation of capital movements and technological innovations made the earth flatter than ever before. In 1980, the share of global trade in gross national product was 39 percent; twenty years later it was 52 percent. The daily forex trading volume increased from $ 70 billion to $ 1.5 trillion. The capitalisation of the world’s listed companies rose from less than $ 5 trillion to over $ 30 trillion.
This rapid “opening up” was driven by governments’ abandonment of control over their countries’ economies. In 1978, the People’s Republic of China started to liberalize the domestic economy and open the country up. In the 1980s, India slowly bade farewell to its socialist past and set off in search of new allies. In 1989, the Iron Curtain across Europe was lifted; two years later, the Soviet Union was dissolved. The European Community was making great strides towards integration by creating a domestic market and a currency union and from that point on started calling itself the European Union as an expression of its new self-confidence. A sense of optimism spread far and wide.
However, the road to geographical and global economic transformation was not without its bumps. At the beginning of the 1990s, Iraq invaded neighbouring Kuwait, prompting intervention by a US-led coalition. Yugoslavia was ravaged by a war lasting several years that, once again, could be ended only by US intervention. In 1994, Rwanda saw the mass genocide of the Tutsi. And in 1997/1998, the global economy was gripped by the Asia and Russia crisis, triggering major losses, high unemployment and political unrest in the affected countries.
Swiss companies were spurred on by the major trends of the time. Direct investments in Eastern Europe and Asia skyrocketed. The Swiss economy sharpened its global focus. As far as the domestic economy was concerned, however, the 1990s were a difficult time for many sectors. The real estate and banking crisis, exacerbated by an excessively restrictive monetary policy, plunged the country into a six-year period of economic stagnation. In 1997, the rate of unemployment reached its highest level since the depression of the 1930s. Sovereign debt jumped from 30 percent to more than 50 percent of GDP. Some social security schemes slipped into deficit and had to be restructured.
As before in the 1970s, not all sectors were hard hit by the economic crisis, and once again the trust and auditing industry proved especially resilient. ATAG was among those companies that continued to grow as if the state of the economy made little difference. Globalisation, by contrast, shook the entire audit and trust industry to its core. If professional service companies wanted to offer their increasingly globally active clients the same services in various countries, they would have to position themselves at the global level and accept international standards requiring amendments to their existing business model and professional profile. With that in mind, ATAG rolled out a fundamental revamp of its image.
Up until the end of the 1970s, ATAG had pursued a dual-track strategy for its international business. On the one hand, it operated its own foreign subsidiaries, and on the other, it collaborated with US-based Arthur Young & Co. Given the new globalisation dynamic, however, this road soon ended in a dead-end. New forms of international networking were called for.
In 1980, then, a European association of auditors, tax advisors and corporate consultants (AMSA) was founded within Arthur Young International (AYI). Its members included, alongside ATAG and AYI, Moret & Limperg (Netherlands) and Schitag (Germany). ATAG’s international subsidiaries – STRECO in Paris and FIS in Milan – were merged with other companies within AMSA. To underline its global focus, AMSA then assumed the name Arthur Young International (AYI) in 1985. One year later, the international market experienced a veritable “big bang” when Peat Marwick Mitchell merged with an association of European trust companies that operated under the name KPM Main Hurdma, thus creating KPMG, the world’s largest auditing and consulting network with turnover of $ 2.7 billion. The other companies that, together with KPMG, constituted the “Big Eight” of the auditing and consulting industry had to react if they wanted to avoid relegation to the sidelines. Alongside Arthur Young, these were Coopers & Lybrand, Arthur Andersen, Ernst & Whinney, Price Waterhouse, Deloitte Haskins & Sells and Touche Ross. Accordingly, there was repeated discussion in the Management Council of Arthur Young International about possible consolidation options; various partners were considered. Eventually, Ernst & Whinney International was the consensual choice, and in summer 1989 the merger was announced: Arthur Young International and Ernst & Whinney International became Ernst & Young International, a global company network with some 70,000 employees in over one hundred countries. Since negotiations were also underway among other companies, Peider Mengiardi spoke in the ATAG Board of Directors of a “feverish energy” within the sector. For the time being, though, there was only one more merger, when Deloitte Haskins & Sells and Touche Ross joined forces as Deloitte & Touche. The “Big Eight” had become the “Big Six”. A merger between two audit and advisory networks meant consolidating hundreds of country offices. The primary benefit in addition to positive economies of scale was a wider global presence, with Ernst & Whinney well established in the United States, the Pacific region and the Middle East, and Arthur Young in Europe. The mergers were generally successful. Only in Canada, Denmark and in some Asian countries did it prove impossible to combine the two networks.
The question as to whether ATAG should join the new Ernst & Young International was discussed only briefly by the Board of Directors. The consensus was that almost every mandate now had international dimensions, even if domestic business still accounted for the lion’s share of ATAG’s activities. “If we don’t take part, the boat will set sail without us and we’ll be left stranded in the provincial shallows,” was how ATAG boss Mengiardi summed it up. And so cooperation was sought with Ernst & Whinney’s partner company in Switzerland, Swirex Ernst & Whinney. Since it was considerably smaller than ATAG, it was agreed that the full integration of all staff into ATAG was the only merger route that made sense. ATAG finally bought Swirex, which had offices in Geneva, Fribourg and Zurich, for CHF 29.6 million. The merger went smoothly and effective from the start of 1990, all Swirex employees became staff of ATAG. The Head of Swirex, Robert Pennone, was given a seat on the Central Management Committee and took over the mergers and acquisitions business. One year later, ATAG took on the name of its international partner as an expression to the outside world of its integration into it. From then on, it was ATAG Ernst & Young. While the individual country offices of Ernst & Young remained independent, financially speaking, there were close contractual ties with regard to the firms’ shared strategy and vision. The objective was to offer audit and advisory services in the same high quality all over the world. The motto was: “One firm worldwide.”
May 1990 saw a change in the top operational echelons of ATAG Ernst & Young. Peider Mengiardi stepped down as Delegate of the Board of Directors. Under his leadership, ATAG had grown into the largest audit and advisory company in Switzerland. Between 1975 and 1990, the operating income of the ATAG Group increased more than five-fold from CHF 60.6 million to CHF 325.5 million, and headcount climbed from 865 to 2057 employees. Mengiardi’s successor at the helm of the Management Committee was Dr. Urs Widmer. He had joined ATAG in 1974, having worked in the legal department, and later, as Director of Interdata, succeeded in getting the data processing centre out of the red. He was appointed to ATAG’s Management Committee in 1986 and headed up ATAG Wirtschaftsinformation Holding AG, the third pillar of ATAG alongside assurance services and advisory services. Peider Mengiardi remained Chairman of the Board of Directors until 1995.
Since ATAG was one of the twelve largest member companies, Urs Widmer had a seat on Ernst & Young International’s Executive Board, and this enabled him to exert direct influence on the integration process. Although the ATAG Management Committee was always in agreement that there was no alternative to being part of the international association, it sought to defend special rights relating to the Swiss market – such as the use of the name “ATAG”. The possibility of being integrated only with the arm of the company that dealt with multinationals and continuing its still-lucrative business with Swiss SMEs as ATAG was also discussed. However, misgivings about this proposal prevailed.
The uniform international image garnered Ernst & Young greater influence and standing and also worked to the benefit of ATAG: in 2000, the Swiss company generated two-thirds of its sales from mandates with an international focus. To embrace the company’s international culture, that same year it dropped “ATAG” from its name and from that point onwards only appeared as Ernst & Young. An era spanning more than eighty years had come to a close. The holding in which the Ernst & Young companies had been grouped together since 1992 has, however, retained the name “ATAG Ernst & Young Holding AG” to this day.
The globalisation of the audit and advisory industry also had fundamental structural implications for Swiss companies. Increased integration of national auditing firms in their international partner associations required independence from the large banks. The Eighth European Council Directive of 1984 also stipulated that the majority of voting rights in auditing firms had to be held by auditors, who also had to constitute a majority of their governing bodies.
This spelled the end for bank-controlled auditing companies. ATAG’s competitors now underwent management buy-outs: the management board of STG bought the shares of its own company in stages from the Swiss Bank Corporation in 1991, Fides achieved its financial independence from Credit Suisse in two management buy-outs in 1981 (auditing business) and 1992 (the remaining trust company), and Revisuisse bought itself out of the Union Bank of Switzerland and Winterthurer Versicherungen in 1989. This completed, the large audit and advisory companies integrated themselves into their international partner associations: Fides was absorbed into KPMG in 1987, Revisuisse Price Waterhouse was created in 1990, and STG became Schweizerische Treuhandgesellschaft Coopers Lybrand AG in 1991. In the meantime, the subsidiaries of the other two of the “Big Six” – Arthur Andersen and Deloitte & Touche – had started to make inroads into the Swiss market. ATAG had already gone through its management buy-out in 1945 and had owned itself – partially 1958 and wholly since 1981. However, in order to comply with the Eighth European Council Directive, it too would need to restructure itself. In 1991, it switched to a holding structure. The audit and advisory service sectors were spun off into a new company, ATAG Ernst & Young AG, in which auditors constituted the majority both in the Management Committee and, through their voting rights, also at the Annual General Meeting. The Board of Directors of ATAG Ernst & Young AG, which simultaneously served as its Management Committee, consisted of the following members alongside its Chairman Urs Widmer: Dr. Mathis Burckhardt, Willy Eggenschwyler, Willi Fischer, Willy Glaus, Dr. Benno Grossmann, Kaspar Hoffmann, Andreas Müller, Dr. Urs Neuenschwander, Robert Pennone and Peter Spori. ATAG Ernst & Young Holding AG functioned as the holding company, headed up by Peider Mengiardi, Urs Widmer, Markus Schär, Dr. Heini Wiki and Elmar Wohlgensinger. A partnership system was also introduced to “take account of the requirements of a modern audit and advisory firm and the needs of its employees”. This was a hybrid lying somewhere between a real partnership system, which defines itself through the financial participation of its senior managers, and the foundation company as it had existed until that point. Partners did not participate in equity, as the company already belonged to the employees via the Stiftung ATAG Treuhand (formerly the Dr. Manfred Hoessly-Stiftung).
Out of the employees who had been appointed Partners (who amounted to all of 2,000 in number) by the start of 1992, 104 did, however, have the right to elect the Foundation Board and have a say on normative and strategic issues. A committee consisting of 29 Partners also had the right to propose and vote on appointments to the Group’s executive bodies. Moreover, the remuneration of the Partners was more heavily dependent on company results and personal performance than was that of the rest of the senior management. “This is intended to promote entrepreneurial thinking and actions,” explained the Annual Report 1991. Among other things, this move responded to a demand of the employment market: the intention was that younger employees should have the prospect of being able to become partners in the firm.
Not only did the major upheavals of the 1980s and 1990s unleash a global trend towards concentration; they also buried Switzerland’s traditional form of corporate governance. While management had formerly been able to basically do as it pleased, shareholders now began to demand more of a say in how businesses were run. Large corporations that until now had been able to fund themselves using hidden reserves or bank loans increasingly turned to the capital market to continue their growth through mergers and acquisitions. Banks took this step as well, since stock market transactions manifestly proved more appealing than the traditional system of issuing corporate loans. This shift in focus to the capital market meant reducing information asymmetries between the shareholder base and the Board of Directors. This was the starting point of the revision of the stock corporation law, which had been a subject of debate since 1972, and which was intended to strengthen investor protection – among other things by increasing transparency in accounting.
At the time, the situation regarding transparency was problematic in comparison with other countries. “Prudence and secrecy are not only our national maxims but also the basis of our accounting law,” wrote ATAG lawyer Prof. Dr. Christoph von Greyerz, Chairman of the Working Group on the Revision of Stock Corporation Law (Arbeitsgruppe zur Revision des Aktienrechts), in Schweizerischer Treuhänder, the industry magazine of the Swiss Institute of Certified Accountants and Tax Consultants, in 1983. Prior to the 1991 revision, Swiss stock corporation law contained no provisions on the structure and presentation of financial statements. In addition, consolidated financial statements were not required. James Pratt, a professor of accountancy in the US, stated in 1983 that, due to its minimal disclosure requirements and the concession to build up hidden reserves, Swiss financial reporting constituted the exact opposite to the “informative accounting” approach adopted by the Anglo-American system.
The audit and advisory industry played an active role through the Swiss Institute of Certified Accountants and Tax Consultants in improving the transparency of Swiss accounting practices. On its initiative, 1984 saw the establishment of the Swiss GAAP FER (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, Accounting and Reporting Recommendations) Foundation. The purpose of this body was to make pertinent accounting and reporting recommendations to companies within the scope of self-regulation and in this way achieve alignment to international standards: the foundation, wrote its first Chairman, André Zünd, in 1983, should help to sharpen the “underdeveloped awareness of many companies of the need for visibility and transparency in financial reporting”.
The growing demand for transparency was also reflected in ATAG’s shifting self-perception. The auditor saw itself less and less as a discreet trustee, but much more as a figurehead of trust between companies and the general public. In a speech on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the ATAG Zurich office in 1974, Office Director Dr. Heini Wiki said: “It is not part of our professional remit to push issues into the spotlight.” This mindset was to come under increasing fire over the course of the 1980s. “Openness to new problems, transparency, calculability and fairness” were described as the cornerstones of trust by Peider Mengiardi in the Annual Report 1987. Two years later, the Annual Report stated: “It is becoming increasingly apparent that consolidated accounting and information policies aligned to international standards are not only in the interests of shareholders, but are also of benefit to companies.” ATAG set a good example in matters of transparency when in 1986 it published consolidated financial statements for the entire ATAG Group for the first time, including its IT and market research companies.
As transparency increased, annual statements became a channel of communication between companies and the outside world. If auditors wanted to strengthen trust in this channel of communication through their audit opinion, it was vital that they should be able to make their judgement independently. A distinction is drawn between two forms of auditor independence: “independence in fact” refers to the auditor’s subjective mindset, to the integrity of their character, to their commitment to do the right thing in spite of their personal interests. “Independence in appearance” is intended to prevent any semblance of a conflict of interests the auditor may be exposed to right from the outset. If, for example, a lead auditor were to hold shares in a company they were auditing, this would impair their independence in appearance, but not necessarily their independence in fact. While, in the 1970s, the emphasis had been on independence in fact, the pendulum now started swinging in the direction of independence in appearance.
For internationally active audit and advisory firms like ATAG, rules and regulations abroad were just as important as those at home. The new Swiss Stock Corporation Act of 1991 specified that auditors had to be independent of the Board of Directors and the majority shareholder of the company being audited. Also, they could not conduct any business with clients that was incompatible with the audit mandate. In addition, there was strong pressure from international auditor networks that followed Anglo-American accounting practice. In the English-speaking world, auditors had long been subject to more stringent requirements in terms of independence because, since the 19th century, companies’ funding mechanisms had been more reliant on the capital market than their counterparts in Continental Europe. Within the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) as well, of which the Swiss Institute of Certified Accountants and Tax Consultants was also a member, Anglo-American rules and regulations had become standard.
For ATAG Ernst & Young, the increased demands on auditor independence affected the compatibility of certain parts of its business. Something now transpired that ATAG had been expecting since the end of the 1970s: auditing firms could no longer perform all kinds of services for the same client. And so it had to say goodbye to some of its business lines.
The first to be impacted was asset management. It had been a lucrative business, earnings from which had played a key role in ATAG’s continued development. ATAG’s asset management division was especially large compared with its competitors’; in 1990, it generated a good one-third of the company’s operating result in real terms. At first glance it seemed absurd to detach itself from this major source of income. However, the regulations laid down by the Ernst & Young association had a definite impact on ATAG’s ability to perform asset management. They stipulated that no asset management services could be provided to audit clients or with the stocks of audit clients. In addition, the name “Ernst & Young” could not be used for the business. In 1991, the Board of Directors therefore decided to spin off asset management into a separate company that was transferred to Stiftung ATAG Treuhand. ATAG Asset Management was sold for a profit to Basellandschaftliche Kantonalbank (BLKB) in 2000, whose CEO told media that the bank had added a jewel to its crown. The execution of asset management mandates also had to be curtailed. The new Swiss Stock Corporation Act stipulated that the auditor must be independent from the Board of Directors, which was not the case if the same company appointed a Board member and also performed the company’s audit. The number of asset management mandates held by ATAG employees was reduced dramatically as a result, leading not only to a decline in fee revenues, but above all the abandonment of top-level client relationships and restrictions to the cross-selling of services.
Performing auditing and management consulting functions in parallel also came in for some criticism. The management consulting departments of all of the “Big Six” had grown dramatically since the 1980s. More and more people started saying that this full service offering compromised the independence of auditors: companies would be auditing circumstances that arose on their advice; in order words, they would be evaluating their own work. A conflict of interest also existed for auditors if other, usually more lucrative advisory mandates were dependent on the audit mandate. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) threatened to separate the “Big Six” from their consulting businesses. Ernst & Young took this step itself and in 2000 sold its entire worldwide management consulting operation (that employed all of 18,000 advisors) to French IT firm Cap Gemini. Other large audit and advisory firms sold off their consulting arms as well. The one exception was Deloitte: following a failed management buy-out of the international Deloitte consulting business in 2003, it remained, for the time being, the only big audit firm with a strong consulting division. The shake-up in ATAG’s service offering was prompted not only by increased requirements regarding independence. The company also wanted to be leaner in general. “We want to move away from an over-wide range of services to focus on concentrating our forces,” Peider Mengiardi told the Board of Directors in 1992. In the IT sector, ATAG was confronted by the rapid pace of technological development and strong competition. For Urs Widmer, it was clear that Interdata’s data processing centre, which in 1988 was merged with Eldag Informatik and the Information Technology division to form ATAG Informatik AG, would only be able to survive if it attained a critical mass and few human personnel resources needed to be deployed. In step with the international strategy of Ernst & Young, the plan was to expand the software division but gradually pull out of the hardware business. In 1993, the company sold 50 percent and later its full stake in ATAG Informatik AG to Debis, an IT company belonging to the Daimler-Benz Group. The majority holding in IHA Markt- und Meinungsforschungsinstitut in Hergiswil was transferred to its international cooperation partner German market research institute Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung (GfK) in 1998.
“Concentrating our forces” also meant turning its back on the regional omnipresence that had characterised ATAG up to that point. Its smaller offices were barely making a profit since their clientèle was limited primarily to small businesses that could not have been expected to pay the fee rate commensurate with the personnel costs involved. “We were simply too expensive for small, regional trust businesses,” recalls Peider Mengiardi. The situation was compounded by the increased difficulty in recruiting qualified staff for outlying offices because there were fewer prospects for promotion there and the mandates tended to be less interesting. Indeed, conflicts of interest erupted between small and large offices because their markets overlapped. To put it bluntly, the company was region-heavy. The Management Committee started to take action to rectify this imbalance in 1994. The credo of being a “local firm for local clients” was retained, but unprofitable offices were gradually closed and the process of separating from “minor clients” begun. By 2011, ATAG’s branches were reduced in number from 23 to just 11 – ten in Switzerland and one in the Principality of Liechtenstein.
This new strategic direction for ATAG Ernst & Young was not just about streamlining the business, however. It also meant taking advantage of acquisition opportunities. A crucial partnership was entered into with auditing firm Neutra Gruppe GBR, headquartered in Berne, in 1992. In 1990, Neutra was, in terms of turnover, the eighth largest auditing firm in Switzerland. The affiliated Gesellschaft für Bankenrevision (GBR) was a major player in its industry. Neutra enjoyed an especially close relationship to Schindler Holding AG, not only by virtue of its function as auditor for the Lucerne-based conglomerate, but also because in the 1970s it had offered the then Chairman of its Board of Directors, Alfred N. Schindler, the opportunity to gain hands-on experience of the financial side of business. Schindler had learned a great deal during his studies in law at the University of Basel, but barely anything about auditing, accounting or balance sheet analysis. His time working with Neutra was a seminal experience for the 25-year-old son of an industrialist, even if he was only able to spend two years there before he left to attend the Wharton School of Finance.“I was quickly involved in large projects. I learned a tremendous amount for my later career in business.” Among other things, his work on mandates for the watchmaking industry gave him first-hand exposure to just how fragile economic life can be. “The lesson that a company can quickly go under if management doesn’t keep a close eye on cashflow and liquidity is one that I have never forgotten. To this day, it influences the way I think and act.” The owners of Neutra, a small group of private shareholders, wanted to sell the company at the beginning of the 1990s. STG Coopers & Lybrand and ATAG Ernst & Young threw their hats into the ring. STG and Neutra had already reached an agreement, but then the Swiss Federal Banking Commission (SFBC) intervened. GBR was the auditor for the Swiss Bank Corporation, which still held a 25 percent stake in STG Coopers & Lybrand. This put a question mark over the independence of the auditor, and the merger was not allowed to take place. Consequently, the owners of Neutra went back to ATAG Ernst & Young, and in 1992 the just over 230 employees of the Neutra Group were integrated into ATAG. The Board of Directors believed that “this company acquisition was of major strategic importance” because GBR’s clientèle included a large number of medium-sized banks and it held the audit mandate not only for the Swiss Bank Corporation, but also for Schweizerische Volksbank (SVB). This put ATAG in a unique position in the Swiss bank audit market prior to the merger between the Swiss Bank Corporation and the Union Bank of Switzerland to form UBS (1998) and the alliance between the Credit Suisse Group (which alongside the Swiss Credit Institution also owned Volksbank) and Winterthur Versicherungen (1997). It was the largest bank auditor in the country.
“Dear colleagues. I am pleased to invite you to the 1997 Partners’ Meeting. It will take place on the cusp of a fundamental change in our company: the merger with KPMG Fides.” It was with these words that Urs Widmer opened the invitation to the Partners on 20 November 1997. For the second time in 75 years, ATAG and Fides were on the verge of a merger – a mega-merger between Ernst & Young and KPMG at the international level. In internal documents, the working abbreviation KEY was already been used to refer to the new company that would emerge from KPMG and Ernst & Young. But it never happened. “At the very last moment, we were told: the merger is cancelled,” recalls Urs Widmer, who at that time as representative of the Swiss company and Member of the Executive Board of EY International was in the Cayman Islands for the final decision on the integration. Those at the top had failed to reach an agreement. The picture was different among the competition: that same year, Coopers & Lybrand and Price Waterhouse merged to form Price-waterhouseCoopers (PWC), the world’s highest-revenue audit and advisory firm. And so the “Big Six” became the “Big Five”.
Although the merger with KPMG had failed, the company had, during preparations for it, worked on a change to its structure that could also be completed on its own: the realignment of the partner model. The ATAG Ernst & Young system was a “partnership with neutralised capital” as Mengiardi so elegantly put it, and thus not a partner model per se. Such a model would require the financial participation of the Partners. Based on the organisation in place at KPMG Fides, a “real” partner system was consequently introduced. Internally, the project was nicknamed “Drive” since its primary aim was to foster entrepreneurship on the part of the Partners through personal involvement. Other factors also played a decisive role. The owner structure with the company foundation that had seen ATAG grow so successfully since 1957 was no longer in step with the times. The trend within the sector was towards greater global integration. However, an international partnership – and furthermore, one that was affiliated through capital – was not possible under the auspices of Stiftung ATAG Treuhand. The logical solution was a partner buy-out from the ownership of the foundation. This was also – as Management Committee Member Peter Spori ascertained – “a pressing concern of our Partners” and should spur the company on a bigger and brighter future.
Since the Stiftung ATAG Treuhand had beneficiaries who were not active employees – namely, pensioners – the question arose as to what price the young generation would be willing to pay to buy the company from the foundation. In the auditing and trust industry, it was common practice to set the purchase price as the company’s net asset value plus a specific percentage of annual revenue as goodwill. According to this method, it was not unusual for the purchase price to be three to four times higher than equity. “It was clear to the active Partners that the partner buy-out could only happen on an equity basis,” recalls Andreas Müller, who at that time was part of the Management Committee. The resulting generational conflict was resolved by means of negotiation and the active Partners ultimately bought the company’s assurance and advisory services divisions from the foundation on an equity basis. In 1998, it acquired 70 percent of the shares and a few years later all of the share certificates, which were subsequently held in an ordinary partnership. The Articles of Partnership that entered into force on 1 October 1998 regulated the form of partnership: founding Partners invested between CHF 100,000 and CHF 300,000 in the company, depending on years of service and rank. At least 30 percent of this had to be paid in directly; the remainder could be financed via a five-year bank loan.
The Partners elected the former Head of the Geneva Office, Marcel Maglock, from within their ranks as the new CEO. Urs Widmer retained the office of Chairman of the Board of Directors in which he had succeeded Peider Mengiardi in 1995. The Management Committee was downsized, consisting alongside Maglock of Ancillo Canepa, Dr. Stephan Hill, Dr. Walter Jakob, Dr. Rudolf Lanz and Bernard Roduit. The Board of Directors comprised, in addition to Widmer, Michel Broch, Dr. Mathis Burckhardt, Dr. Benno Grossmann, Andreas Müller, Werner Schlapbach, Peter Spori and Dr. René Stauber.
The partner buy-out closed the chapter on the forty-year period of ATAG as the foundation company. It also ended the three-way division of the business area introduced in the 1980s. The days of an in-house data centre were over; now it was a pure audit and advisory firm again. The Stiftung ATAG Treuhand began to sell off other investments, including the properties erected in the 1960s, participations in the area of business information and ATAG Asset Management. The profits were distributed democratically to the beneficiaries, as provided for in the Articles of Foundation.