GENEVA, SWITZERLAND - Switzerland's biggest bank UBS plans to cut up to 5,000 senior and management jobs in the next few weeks, Swiss weekly SonntagsZeitung said yesterday.

SonntagsZeitung said that according to its own research, up to 2,500 management positions could go in UBS's dominant and profitable wealth management division, which accounts for 50,000 of the bank's total 77,000 staff. A UBS spokesman declined to comment on the report.

UBS said last week that it was restructuring its Swiss business structure into four regions from eight, and trimming its top management. But it said that the changes did not mean any more job cuts than the 600 to 800 positions that it had already planned to cut in Switzerland as part of the thousands of job losses globally that it had already announced.

UBS said in February that after a record loss, it would cut 2,000 jobs to take staff to about 75,000 by mid-year. It is struggling to rebuild its once powerful brand and focus on its core Swiss business after massive investments in risky US assets forced it to make more write-downs than any other European bank and accept government backing.