Former Swiss Bankers’ Association president found guilty of paying $101 million in bribes

The man who once served as the public face of Swiss banking just got convicted of corrupting it. Pierre Mirabaud, former president of the Swiss Bankers’ Association and retired partner at the Geneva private bank bearing his family name, was found guilty of foreign bribery and aggravated money laundering by Switzerland’s Federal Criminal Court in Bellinzona. The price tag on the scheme: 82.3 million Swiss francs, roughly $101 million, paid in kickbacks over more than a decade to win assets from Kuwait’s sovereign pension fund. A 12-year trail of payments The bribes weren’t a one-time lapse in judgment. They stretched from 2000 to 2012, spread across hundreds of separate transactions directed at the chairman of Kuwait’s Public Institution for Social Security, known as PIFSS. The goal was straightforward: convince PIFSS to park its money with Mirabaud & Cie, the boutique private bank where Pierre Mirabaud was a partner. It worked. The scheme funneled approximately $595 million to $600 million in assets to the bank. Mirabaud led the Swiss Bankers’ Association from 2003 to 2009, a period during which international pressure on Swiss banking secrecy was mounting. He retired from the b...