I figured out (hopefully correctly) that owner, group and accession rights to files and directories on an smbmount are not changeable, not even by root. Thus you have to specify everything at mount time, e.g.:
sudo mount -t smbfs -o username=jeltsch,credentials=/home/jeltsch/.smbpasswd5 -o uid=backuppc,gid=users,fmask=644,dmask=755 //patolmac217/jeltsch /mnt/jeltsch@patolmac217.hi.helsinki.fi