UBS Director’s Luxury Hong Kong Hideaway

A board job at the Swiss wealth giant is a lucrative gig, but probably not lead to ultra-high net worth riches. Or at least not rich enough to purchase one of Hong Kong’s priciest manses, as Fred Hu just did.

Hu plopped down HK$428 million ($55 million) for a 4,755-square foot home on Tai Tam Road in Hong Kong, according to Land Registry Records. This is just shy of an anonymous Chinese buyer who set a record when putting down HK$459 million in February for a home in the territory.

Hu is a heavyweight who left Goldman Sachs, where he was a partner and oversaw the U.S. investment bank’s activities in China, to launch his own private equity firm, Primavera, in 2010. Primavera has $2.9 billion in assets under management, according to «Bloomberg».

In 2018, Swiss wealth manager UBS snagged Hu as a director, where he is part of succession planning as a member of a governance and nominations committee, as well as part of risk oversight.

Hu also sits on the boards of Ant Group, Hong Kong’s stock exchange, and ICBC, a Chinese lender which is the world’s largest by assets. A fund managed by Hu’s Primavera was spotlighted last year for allegedly selling heavily discounted Ant Group shares to Hu’s siblings – underscoring the perils of rapid wealth growth in Asia.

As for Hu’s pay at UBS: he takes home 600,000 Swiss francs ($670,000) annually, 50 percent of which is in shares of the Swiss bank.