LONDON (Reuters) ? British anti-capitalist protesters occupied a third location in London on Friday, "repossessing" a large empty office block owned by Swiss banking giant UBS.
A dozen protesters from the "Occupy London" group scaled ladders to gain access overnight to the first floor of the sprawling office complex in the capital's financial district.
"UBS was bailed out for $60 billion in 2008 and had a rogue trader that lost billions just this year," said the group's spokeswoman Tanya Paton.
"It just shows how wealthy and incompetent banks are that they can lose this money and not even notice. Swiss banks have been used as a tax haven for everyone from the Nazis to Gaddafi."
The Occupy London group, inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement, has set up camps outside St Paul's Cathedral and in Finsbury Square in the heart of the City.
The choice of site for a third occupation appeared a mixture of pragmatism as well as ideology. The UBS building is well-known to squatters and was used by them during a meeting of G20 leaders in London in 2008.
Protesters led Reuters on a tour of the cavernous complex. Rubble-filled rooms were littered with screwdrivers, tins of paint, ropes and bedding.
Occupiers had been tidying up with brooms and vacuum cleaners. An executive pay advice brochure lay discarded under piles of broken glass on damp-stained carpets. Old computers, invoice files and Venetian blinds were still in place.
"BANK OF IDEAS"
The protesters said the location would be reopened on Saturday as a "Bank of Ideas" but there would be no permanent residential occupation as at the other camps.
The Occupy group argued while banks were repossessing homes of families who could not keep up their mortgage repayments, they were sitting on huge empty properties themselves. Official figures show 9,200 homes in Britain were repossessed by mortgage lenders in the third quarter of the year.
"We hope this is the first in a wave of 'public repossessions' of property belonging to companies that crashed the global economy," said protester Jack Holburn.
UBS has been in the headlines in Britain after one of its London-based employees was charged with rogue trading which the bank said had cost it some $2.3 billion.
Kweku Adoboli, a former director of exchange traded funds at UBS, is due to enter a plea to those charges in court next week.
UBS, which confirmed it was the legal owners of the site, said the building was unoccupied and the action had no impact on either its business or its staff.
"We are aware of the situation and are taking appropriate action," the bank said in a statement.
Under laws governing squatting, building owners have to go to court to obtain a possession order, a procedure that usually takes about a month, the Occupy group said.
On Thursday, the anti-capitalists defied a deadline to remove their tents from outside St Paul's Cathedral. The City of London Corporation, which owns much of the land on which the 200 tents were pitched a month ago, will now begin legal proceedings in the High Court to remove them.
The corporation has followed different methods from New York authorities, which used riot police to kick out Occupy Wall Street demonstrators in a surprise pre-dawn raid on Tuesday.
(Writing by Michael Holden; editing by Andrew Roche)
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