The fiduciari and the parabanking sector

Three hundred and fifty-eight financial companies

Alongside the banks, the lira economy created a second industry: the fiduciary and financial companies that founded, domiciled and administered the structures in which Italian wealth was held. In 1965 the town of Lugano, with about 25,000 inhabitants, was home to 358 financial companies (società finanziarie). Their growth ran in parallel with the inflow of Italian capital, and the historian M. Kuder, whose research Berbenni follows on this point, regarded many of them as cover companies for the externalization of capital.¹ The concentration of mandates in a few hands was striking. According to the same research, the Lugano lawyer and financier Tito Tettamanti chaired 71 companies and held 268 board mandates in 1966.² Such figures did not imply wrongdoing by the individuals concerned. They show the structure of a market in which a small group of professionals lent their names, their addresses and their signatures to hundreds of companies whose owners lived in Italy.

The legal instruments were Swiss companies limited by shares (società anonime), Liechtenstein establishments and foundations and, increasingly, companies from Panama and other offshore jurisdictions. A Swiss holding or domiciliary company paid low cantonal taxes under the privileged regimes that Ticino, like other cantons, granted to companies without business activity in Switzerland.³ It needed a domicile, at least one director resident in Switzerland and an accountant. The fiduciary firm provided all three. It also provided the link to the bank, which opened the account in the company's name, and in many cases the instructions to the bank came from the fiduciary, who held a power of attorney. The bank knew the fiduciary. Whether it knew the Italian behind the company depended on the fiduciary's willingness to disclose him.

The Ticinese profession

The Ticinese professional who served this market typically combined several qualifications. Lawyers in Ticino were often also notaries, with the public authority to draw up deeds of incorporation, and many of them ran fiduciary companies that handled accounting, tax returns, company administration and asset management. Accountants and commercial agents founded fiduciary firms of their own. The Italian term fiduciario came to cover a broad range of activities: the fiduciario commercialista who kept accounts and filed tax returns, the fiduciario finanziario who managed assets or acted as intermediary between clients and banks, and the fiduciario immobiliare who managed property.⁴ None of these activities required a licence in the period covered by this chapter. Anyone could found a fiduciary company, while the professional organizations had no power to exclude members who acted improperly.

The bankers' due diligence agreement of 1977 brought the fiduciaries into the regulatory picture for the first time. The banks undertook to establish the identity of the beneficial owner of accounts opened by domiciliary companies and intermediaries, with an exception for professionals bound by a duty of secrecy, such as lawyers and notaries, who could declare that they knew the beneficial owner without naming him (Chapter D.III). Members of the Swiss Fiduciaries' Association (Schweizerischer Treuhänder-Verband) had enjoyed this privilege under the original agreement. When the revised agreement of 1982 limited it to members of chambers affiliated with the Swiss Chamber of Auditors (Treuhand-Kammer), the association challenged the decision before the Federal Court. The Court declared the complaint inadmissible, because the agreement was a private law contract and the letter of the Swiss National Bank was no administrative decision. In its reasoning the Court described the agreement as directed against foreign clients who wanted to place money in Swiss banks for purposes of capital flight, tax evasion and similar activities.⁵

Notes

1. Berbenni (as above), 330 ("nel 1965 erano 358 nella sola Lugano, una cittadina di 25.000 abitanti"), citing M. Kuder, Italia e Svizzera dal 1945 al 1970 (2012). ↩
2. Berbenni (as above), 330 (Tettamanti at the head of 71 companies and holding 268 board mandates in 1966). ↩
3. The cantonal regimes for holding, domiciliary and mixed companies, later harmonized in Art. 28 paras. 2–4 of the Federal Act on the Harmonization of Direct Taxes of the Cantons and Communes (StHG), SR 642.14, were repealed by the Federal Act of 28 September 2018 on Tax Reform and AHV Financing (TRAF) "mit Wirkung seit 1. Jan. 2020", text at https://www.droit-bilingue.ch/de-fr/6/64/642.14-28-50.html; on the transitional rules see Art. 78g StHG, https://www.droit-bilingue.ch/de-fr/6/64/642.14-78g-138.html, and Chapter F.II. ↩
4. The three categories are those of the current Ticino law: Legge sull'esercizio delle professioni di fiduciario (LFid) of 1 December 2009, Art. 1 ("Le attività di fiduciario commercialista, fiduciario immobiliare e fiduciario finanziario svolte per conto di terzi a titolo professionale nel Cantone Ticino sono soggette ad autorizzazione"), text on LexFind, https://www.lexfind.ch/tolv/103359/it. See Chapter E.III. ↩
5. Federal Court, judgment of 3 June 1983, Schweizerischer Treuhänder-Verband v. Schweizerische Nationalbank, BGE 109 Ib 146, https://servat.unibe.ch/dfr/b1109146.html. ↩

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 October 2026.