Switzerland's Federal Criminal Court on Tuesday sentenced former private banker Pierre Mirabaud, 77, to a suspended two-year prison term for bribing a public official and aggravated money laundering. A former partner of the Geneva bank Mirabaud & Cie and president of the Swiss Bankers Association from 2003 to 2009, he admitted paying US$ 101.7 million, about R$ 518.7 million, in bribes to a Kuwaiti government official, according to the Brazilian news site G1.
Swiss federal prosecutors said Mirabaud made hundreds of payments to the official between 2000 and 2012. In return, the arrangement steered US$ 595.2 million, about R$ 3.035 billion, in managed assets to the bank. According to Bloomberg, whose report was republished by Brazil's InfoMoney, the recipient was Fahad Al Rajaan, who ran Kuwait's Public Institution for Social Security, the country's public pension fund, from 1984 to 2013. The court acquitted Mirabaud of a separate charge of document forgery.
The trial in Bellinzona, the city that hosts the federal criminal court, lasted half a day. Mirabaud accepted a simplified procedure, admitting the irregularities in order to speed the case up and obtain a lighter sentence. Prosecutors had asked for 24 months, citing his age, his clean record and his cooperation with investigators. He was also ordered to pay 82,000 Swiss francs in court costs. Under Swiss law, corruption and money laundering carry a fine or up to five years in prison, and sentences are usually suspended when the offender is not expected to reoffend.
"Throughout this process, which began in 2012, Pierre Mirabaud cooperated fully with the judicial authorities. Today, he is taking responsibility for his actions, in line with the principles of individual responsibility," his lawyer, Saverio Lembo, said in a statement.
How the case reached the court
After complaints about his management of the pension fund, Al Rajaan had his assets frozen and became the target of an Interpol arrest request. He was convicted in absentia in Kuwait in 2016 of corruption and embezzlement of public funds, and died in London in 2022. Bloomberg reports that the fund installed a new management team in 2017 and wound down more than US$ 20 billion in investments it considered suspicious. The case also went to trial at the High Court in London last year, and no ruling has been published yet.
The bank and the regulator
Mirabaud & Cie, founded in Geneva in 1819 and run by the seventh generation of the founding family, is not a party to the case and declined to comment on the conviction. In 2024, the Swiss financial regulator FINMA confiscated 12.7 million Swiss francs in profits it deemed illegally obtained by the bank, after finding breaches of market rules and anti-money-laundering obligations. The business relationships under review at times represented nearly 10 percent of all assets the bank managed.
Because the sentence is suspended, Mirabaud will not go to prison as long as he meets the conditions of the two-year probation period. A breach could lead to the sentence being enforced. The next known step in the case is the London High Court ruling, for which no date has been announced.