Traders and International Geneva

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Commodity trading and International Geneva, described in Part F, grew up side by side without mixing, and then met. The international organisations established in Geneva, the World Trade Organization, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and the International Trade Centre, produce standards, analyses and statistics on commodity trade. Geneva’s non-governmental organisations, several of which are devoted to natural resources, human rights and transparency, examine the practices of traders with an attention that proximity makes effective.¹ The traders, long discreet, have learned to engage in dialogue with these interlocutors, to take part in transparency initiatives and to respond publicly to criticism.

This encounter has produced concrete results: the participation of traders in the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, described in Part H, guidelines on responsible commodity trading drawn up with the Confederation and non-governmental organisations, and training programmes bringing together the University of Geneva, the traders and the international organisations.² It also has its limits. The non-governmental organisations remain critical and the traders discreet, while the coexistence in a single city of the organisations that set the standards and the companies that sometimes breach them gives Geneva a singular position, at once judge and party in the world commodity trade.

Notes

UNCTAD, “History” (unctad.org): first United Nations Conference on Trade and Development held in Geneva in 1964, institutionalised with a permanent secretariat, Raúl Prebisch its first Secretary-General; Wikipedia (en), art. “Public Eye (organization)”: organisation founded in 1968 under the name Déclaration de Berne (Berne Declaration), renamed Public Eye on 23 May 2016, offices in Lausanne and Zurich; Déclaration de Berne, Swiss Trading SA. La Suisse, le négoce et la malédiction des matières premières, Lausanne, Éditions d’en bas, 2011; Public Eye, “Portrait de la ROHMA”, 2014 (fictitious supervisory authority proposed for the commodities sector). ↩
United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, Human Rights Council resolution 17/4 of 16 June 2011 (ohchr.org). ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.

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Dr Alexander Ressos, TEP

Rechtsanwalt/Attorney-at-Law

I am a Swiss attorney-at-law and also admitted as a solicitor in Hong Kong and in England & Wales, with almost 25 years of experience.

Together with my multilingual team, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Ukrainian and French native speakers, I advise companies and their owners from around the world on the full range of banking, corporate, commercial and tax law matters in Switzerland, including international tax planning, fiduciary services, and legal family office services including immigration & relocation or real estate investments. My practice has a particular focus on clients from growth and frontier markets in Greater China, Central Asia and the Caucasus, the rest of Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, and I equally advise clients from Europe and North America. Through an affiliated Swiss trust company, we also take care of the incorporation and ongoing administration of their companies and other structures, including accounting, tax returns and corporate secretarial services, and I serve as a professional director where required. With the support of a network of first-class cooperation partners, I also implement solutions worldwide.

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Traders and International Geneva

Notes

Setting up or expanding in Switzerland?