HONG KONG: UBS Group offers Hong Kong staff up to $2,000 US $256.45 a day to help cover mandatory hotel quarantine costs, as the city maintains some of the strictest COVID 19 restrictions in the world.
The bank said full-time employees up to executive director level would be eligible for the payments between now and the end of November 2022.
A UBS spokesman in Hong Kong confirmed the contents of the memo.
Hong Kong requires 21 day mandatory hotel quarantine for arrivals from most countries, which is paid for by the traveller.
Non-residents from four African countries have been banned from entering Hong Kong and will expand that to travellers who have been in Australia, Canada, Israel and six European countries in the past 21 days because of the Omicron coronaviruses variant.
Hong Kong is one of the last places in the world pursuing a zero-COVID 19 strategy and has some of the tightest travel restrictions.
It hopes to reopen the border with mainland China in the coming months, which also has no tolerance for coronaviruses cases.
The strategy is a big headache for banks as they try to retain staff in Hong Kong.
JPMorgan is granting some staff a one-off payment of up to US $5,000 to cover their quarantine costs.