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 bank itself in 2009 but continued working as a consultant until 2012, the same year the last kickback payments were made.
The sentence and its logic
The court handed down a two-year suspended prison term, meaning Mirabaud won’t serve time behind bars unless he reoffends. The trial itself lasted only hours, a result of simplified proceedings triggered by Mirabaud’s admission of guilt.
Several factors worked in his favor at sentencing. His age, a clean prior record, and his cooperation with authorities all weighed as mitigating circumstances. He had also already repaid PIFSS 42 million Swiss francs before the court’s decision, covering roughly half of the bribe total.
A separate charge of document forgery was dismissed entirely.