Federal jurisdiction

The Office of the Attorney General and Article 24 StPO

The prosecution of crime in Switzerland is in principle a cantonal task. The Confederation prosecutes only offences that the law expressly assigns to it, such as offences against the state, explosives offences and offences committed by federal officials. In the field of economic crime, however, the Criminal Procedure Code creates a significant federal competence. Under Article 24 paragraph 1 StPO, participation in or support of a criminal organisation, the financing of terrorism, money laundering (Article 305bis SCC), insufficient diligence in financial transactions (Article 305ter SCC) and the bribery of Swiss and foreign public officials (Articles 322ter to 322septies SCC) are subject to federal jurisdiction when the offences were committed to a substantial extent abroad or in several cantons without a clear focus in any one of them. Article 24 paragraph 2 adds that, for felonies against property and for forgery (the second and eleventh titles of the Criminal Code), the federal prosecutor may open an investigation under the same conditions. Once the federal prosecutor has done so, federal jurisdiction is established.¹

The result is a division of labour that practitioners in Zurich must master at the outset of any significant case. A domestic fraud committed by a Zurich asset manager against Zurich clients remains a cantonal case. An international bribery scheme routed through Zurich bank accounts, or a money laundering case involving funds from several continents, will usually be taken over by the Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland (Bundesanwaltschaft, OAG). Private bribery under Article 322octies SCC, by contrast, is not listed in Article 24 and therefore remains within cantonal jurisdiction, even where the facts are international. The same applies to criminal mismanagement and misappropriation unless the OAG exercises its optional competence under Article 24 paragraph 2. Conflicts of jurisdiction between the Confederation and a canton are decided by the Objections Chamber of the Federal Criminal Court.

The OAG is headquartered in Bern and maintains branch offices in Lausanne, Lugano and Zurich. The Zurich branch celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 2024, together with the offices in Lausanne and Lugano. Under the Attorney General Stefan Blättler, the OAG has presented its milestone convictions of the commodity traders Gunvor, Glencore and Trafigura for failures to prevent foreign bribery as evidence that Swiss enforcement against multinational companies has matured.² The report for 2025, published in April 2026, placed cybercrime, money laundering and international corruption among the priorities of the office and mentioned that several banks had been sanctioned by summary penalty order during the year. It also recalled the trilateral alliance concluded on 20 March 2025 with the Serious Fraud Office of England and Wales and the French Parquet national financier to combat international corruption.³

The trilateral alliance deserves a moment’s attention, because it marks a change in the international position of Swiss prosecutors. For decades, Swiss authorities had been the recipients of foreign pressure and requests. With the alliance, the OAG presented itself as a partner of equal standing to two of the most active European enforcement agencies. For companies with operations in Zurich, London and Paris, the practical consequence is that a corruption problem discovered in one of these jurisdictions may quickly reach the others.

The Federal Criminal Court in Bellinzona

Federal criminal cases are tried by the Federal Criminal Court in Bellinzona, in the Canton of Ticino, which began operations on 1 April 2004. The court has three chambers. The Criminal Chamber tries cases at first instance, including corruption, economic crime and money laundering cases under federal jurisdiction as well as offences under federal administrative criminal law referred to it. The Objections Chamber reviews procedural acts of the federal prosecution authorities, decides conflicts of jurisdiction between the Confederation and the cantons, and hears appeals in matters of international mutual legal assistance. The Appeals Chamber, finally, hears appeals against judgments of the Criminal Chamber.⁴ Until the end of 2018, judgments of the Criminal Chamber could be challenged only before the Federal Supreme Court, which reviewed the facts only for arbitrariness. The creation of the Appeals Chamber with effect from 1 January 2019 introduced a full second instance on the facts for federal cases as well.⁵

For Zurich, the geographical distance between the financial centre and the federal criminal court has practical significance. Zurich banks, commodity traders and wealth managers facing federal charges must litigate in Italian-speaking Bellinzona, although the proceedings are usually conducted in German or French depending on the case. Some of the most significant judgments for the Swiss financial centre, among them the Credit Suisse Bulgaria case, the Trafigura case and the Karimova case, have been handed down there. The court’s case law on Article 102 SCC is therefore as important for Zurich practice as the judgments of the Zurich Obergericht.

FINMA: enforcement without criminal sanctions

The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) is not a criminal authority. It supervises banks, insurers, securities firms, fund managers, portfolio managers and trustees and enforces supervisory law through administrative proceedings. Its toolkit includes precautionary measures, orders to restore compliance, declaratory rulings, industry bans, cease-and-desist orders, the publication of final rulings, the disgorgement of profits and, as the most severe measures, the withdrawal of a licence, liquidation and bankruptcy.⁶ The absence of a power to fine distinguishes FINMA from the Financial Conduct Authority in London or the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington, which also explains why the monetary consequences of misconduct at Swiss financial institutions frequently arise abroad or in criminal proceedings at home.

The relationship between FINMA and the prosecution authorities is governed by Article 38 of the Financial Market Supervision Act (FINMASA). FINMA and the competent prosecution authority exchange the information necessary for their cooperation and the fulfilment of their tasks and coordinate their investigations as far as possible and necessary. Where FINMA learns of felonies or misdemeanours under general criminal law or of violations of the financial market laws, it must notify the competent prosecution authority.⁷ In practice, this means that a FINMA enforcement proceeding against a Zurich bank for serious deficiencies in money laundering controls often runs in parallel with, or precedes, a criminal investigation by the OAG against the same bank and its employees.

The Credit Suisse Mozambique affair shows how the supervisory and criminal tracks can diverge across borders. In October 2021 FINMA concluded that Credit Suisse had seriously violated organisational requirements and its reporting obligations under the Anti-Money Laundering Act in connection with loans to state-owned companies in Mozambique. FINMA found that the bank’s risk management had focused on financial risk while neglecting reputational risk, that major lending decisions had not been escalated to group level and that a suspicious activity report had been filed only in 2019. It ordered an independent review of the bank’s risk management, the escalation of high-risk lending transactions to group level and temporary transparency conditions on new loans to financially weak or corruption-prone states. FINMA coordinated its proceedings with the Financial Conduct Authority, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the US Department of Justice, whose parallel proceedings were concluded at the same time.⁸ The monetary penalties in this affair were thus paid to authorities in London and Washington, while the Swiss contribution consisted of supervisory measures.

The collapse of Credit Suisse in March 2023 and the subsequent debate about the powers of FINMA, treated in Part G, have strengthened calls for a Swiss supervisor with the power to impose fines. For the purposes of this chapter, the essential point is that the sanctioning function in Switzerland remains divided between an administrative supervisor without fining powers and criminal authorities that must prove individual or organisational fault according to the standards of criminal law.

The FDF criminal law service and administrative criminal law

A third track exists alongside ordinary criminal procedure and supervisory enforcement. Violations of the criminal provisions of FINMASA and the financial market laws, such as carrying on a licensed activity without a licence, providing false information to FINMA or breaching the duty to report suspicious transactions under the Anti-Money Laundering Act, are prosecuted under the Federal Act on Administrative Criminal Law of 22 March 1974 (Verwaltungsstrafrechtsgesetz, VStrR). Under Article 50 paragraph 1 FINMASA, the Federal Department of Finance (FDF) is the prosecuting and adjudicating authority. Where a court decision is requested or where the FDF considers that the conditions for a custodial sentence are met, the case falls under federal jurisdiction and the FDF transmits the file to the OAG for the attention of the Federal Criminal Court.⁹ Article 44 FINMASA illustrates the severity of these offences: the intentional exercise of an activity requiring a licence, registration or affiliation with a self-regulatory organisation without the necessary authorisation is punishable by a custodial sentence of up to three years or a monetary penalty, while negligent violations carry a fine of up to CHF 250,000.¹⁰

The FDF’s criminal law service thus combines the functions of prosecutor and first-instance judge for a considerable range of financial market offences. Its competence extends to violations of FINMASA, the Banking Act, the Financial Institutions Act, the Anti-Money Laundering Act, the Insurance Supervision Act, the Financial Market Infrastructure Act, the Financial Services Act and other statutes. It publishes statistics on its caseload, reporting for 2025 a median duration of 334 days and an average duration of 576 days from complaint to final decision.¹¹ Among its typical cases are proceedings against compliance officers and managers of financial intermediaries who failed to report suspicious transactions to the Money Laundering Reporting Office (MROS) in good time, a subject treated from the supervisory side in chapter I.III.

The Administrative Criminal Law Act is almost as old as the modern Swiss financial centre and has long been criticised as outdated. In January 2024 the Federal Council opened a consultation on a total revision intended to make administrative criminal procedure more efficient and to align it more closely with the Criminal Procedure Code, while keeping administrative criminal law in a separate statute.¹² In May 2026, after evaluating the responses, the Federal Council decided to pursue only a cost-conscious revision. It instructed the Federal Department of Justice and Police to weigh the costs and benefits of each adjustment with particular care, citing the strained financial situation of the Confederation and the opposition of the cantons to any additional tasks.¹³ As of September 2026, the 1974 Act therefore remains the procedural basis for the prosecution of financial market offences by the FDF.

The interplay between the two procedures has produced significant case law. Where the VStrR does not regulate a question exhaustively, the Federal Supreme Court applies the provisions of the Criminal Procedure Code by analogy. This principle was stated in a decision of March 2018 concerning the sealing of an internal investigation report that a bank had commissioned from a law firm and that the FDF sought to use in administrative criminal proceedings against bank officers for violations of the reporting duty.¹⁴ The substance of the privilege case law is discussed in section VIII.

Notes

1. StPO, Art. 24, text as published on droit-bilingue.ch, https://www.droit-bilingue.ch/de-fr/3/31/312.0-24-27.html. The conditions of letters a and b (commission to a substantial extent abroad, or in several cantons without a clear focus) are summarised here. Paragraphs 1 and 2 were last amended with effect from 1 July 2021 in connection with the implementation of the Council of Europe Convention on the Prevention of Terrorism. ↩
2. Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland, Tätigkeitsbericht 2024, https://www.bundesanwaltschaft.ch/dam/de/sd-web/9xV1wc6EJOgG/T%C3%A4tigkeitsbericht_Bundesanwaltschaft_2024.pdf. The report also refers to provisional freezing orders of more than CHF 1.3 billion connected with violations of the sanctions against Russia. ↩
3. Swiss Federal Council, news release “Die Bundesanwaltschaft erzielt 2025 bedeutende Ergebnisse und trägt zur Stärkung der inneren Sicherheit bei”, 2 April 2026, https://www.admin.ch/de/newnsb/HXKYFESgffYvQOzpHDVOB. ↩
4. Federal Criminal Court, “Das Bundesstrafgericht in Kürze”, https://www.bstger.ch/de/il-tribunale/il-tribunale-penale-federale-in-breve.html. ↩
5. Parliamentary Services, press release of the Judicial Committee, “Wahl der Mitglieder der neuen Berufungskammer des Bundesstrafgerichts in der Sommersession”, 31 May 2018, https://www.parlament.ch/press-releases/Pages/mm-gk-2018-05-31.aspx?lang=1031 (“Die neue Berufungskammer des Bundesstrafgerichts (BStGer) nimmt ihre Arbeit am 1. Januar 2019 auf.”). ↩
6. FINMA, “Enforcement tools”, https://www.finma.ch/en/enforcement/enforcement-tools/. The list on the page does not include fines, which FINMA has no power to impose. ↩
7. FINMASA, Art. 38 paras. 1–3, https://www.droit-bilingue.ch/de-fr/9/95/956.1-38-45.html. ↩
8. FINMA, press release “FINMA concludes proceedings against Credit Suisse”, 19 October 2021, https://www.finma.ch/en/news/2021/10/20211019-mm-cs-mosambik/. The foreign authorities imposed substantial monetary penalties in their own proceedings, which the FINMA release does not quantify. ↩
9. FINMASA, Art. 50 paras. 1–2, https://www.droit-bilingue.ch/de-fr/9/95/956.1-50-73.html. ↩
10. FINMASA, Art. 44 paras. 1–2, https://www.droit-bilingue.ch/de-fr/9/95/956.1-44-67.html. ↩
11. Federal Department of Finance, “Strafrechtsdienst”, https://www.efd.admin.ch/de/strafrechtsdienst. The page also notes that decisions are published in full for thirty days and are thereafter available in anonymised form on request. ↩
12. Swiss Federal Council, news release “Verwaltungsstrafrecht soll moderner und effizienter werden”, 31 January 2024, https://www.admin.ch/de/nsb?id=99873. The consultation ran until 10 May 2024. ↩
13. Swiss Federal Council, news release “Das Verwaltungsstrafrecht soll kostenschonend revidiert werden”, 13 May 2026, https://www.admin.ch/de/newnsb/Y6ZSIA9RTTPW. ↩
14. Federal Supreme Court, judgment 1B_433/2017 of 21 March 2018, consideration 1.1, https://entscheide.weblaw.ch/cache.php?link=21.03.2018_1b_433-2017&sel_lang=en. The appellant in the proceedings before the Federal Supreme Court was the Federal Department of Finance. ↩

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.