What a federal court in Ticino means for the financial centre

An institution of the first rank in Italian Switzerland

The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland describes post-war Bellinzona as a city of cantonal officials and employees.¹ Since 2004 it has also been a city of federal judges, clerks and prosecutors' visitors. The court has brought a federal legal culture to the cantonal capital. More than 90 people work at the court itself, judges included. Its trials attract lawyers, interpreters, journalists and experts from all parts of Switzerland and abroad.² The economic effect is modest compared with the banking sector of Lugano, which Chapter E.I described. The institutional effect is larger. Italian Switzerland now hosts the court that decides the most important federal cases of economic crime and most appeals in international mutual assistance, and Italian-speaking judges sit in a court whose judgments are read by compliance officers in Zurich, Geneva and abroad.

For the financial centre of Lugano the court's presence has three practical consequences. The first is proximity. Banks, fiduciaries and lawyers in Lugano are thirty kilometres from the court, while the OAG's Lugano office is in the same city as their clients. Hearings in cases concerning Lugano accounts are within easy reach. The court's Italian-speaking clerks and judges handle the cases conducted in Italian. The second is a body of case law in Italian on money laundering, mutual assistance and corporate liability that Ticino practitioners can use directly. The third is a professional environment in which defence lawyers, prosecutors and judges meet regularly, so that the standards of federal criminal practice become familiar to the Ticino bar.

The compliance perspective

For compliance officers the judgments of the Federal Criminal Court are the most authoritative interpretation of what Article 102 SCC requires, together with the case law of the Federal Supreme Court. The bank cases of 2022 to 2026 show several points that matter for a Lugano institution. A conviction requires proof of the predicate offence and of the money laundering committed within the bank, and the prosecution's case may fail where the predicate offence remains doubtful, as in the acquittal of 28 June 2023. The organizational deficiency must be shown concretely, for example in the handling of cash deposits, of politically exposed persons or of intermediaries. Proceedings can last for many years. The death of an employee or the merger of the bank can change their outcome. Penalty orders allow the OAG to conclude cases quickly when the bank cooperates, as in the PKB case in Lugano.

The trading cases add a further lesson. The Trafigura and Gunvor judgments concern payments to officials of state-owned companies through intermediaries. The court examined in detail how the companies selected, paid and supervised their agents. Lugano's commodity traders, whose business with state enterprises in Africa, the former Soviet Union and Latin America is smaller but similar in structure, should read these judgments as a description of the controls that a Swiss court will expect. Chapter G.I discussed the related risks in trade finance and Chapter G.II the sanctions regime that has created a parallel set of criminal risks since 2022.

Notes

1. Pablo Crivelli and Chiara Orelli, "Bellinzona", in Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, version of 5 April 2017, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/002031/2017-04-05/. ↩
2. Geschäftsbericht 2025 (above) (22 judges and 71 clerks and administrative staff). ↩

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 August 2025.