The Meili affair

A night in the shredding room

On the evening of 8 January 1997, Christoph Meili, a security guard employed by an outside company at a building of the Union Bank of Switzerland in Zurich, noticed two containers of old files and ledgers in a room where documents were shredded. Among them he found volumes that appeared to relate to the Second World War period. He took some of them home and handed them to a Jewish organisation in Zurich, which passed them on to the police and informed the press. The destruction became public on 14 January 1997.¹ The shredding had taken place barely a month after the federal decree of 13 December 1996 had prohibited the destruction of documents relevant to the investigation.

The content and significance of the documents were later disputed. A later account in the Zurich financial press emphasised that many of the rescued volumes dated from the years 1897 to 1927 and could therefore not have proved the existence of dormant accounts of Holocaust victims.² Other descriptions of the material mention records of the Eidgenössische Bank, which the Union Bank of Switzerland had taken over in 1945, relating to property transactions in Berlin in the 1930s.³ For the political effect, the exact content mattered less than the image of a Zurich big bank shredding historical documents in the middle of an international investigation, in apparent breach of a federal decree.

Consequences for Meili and for the bank

Meili’s fate became part of the controversy. The Zurich prosecuting authorities opened proceedings against him for a suspected breach of banking secrecy, which were later discontinued. He lost his job, received threats and left for the United States with his family.⁴ Senator D’Amato introduced a private bill for the relief of Meili and his family, which President Clinton signed on 29 July 1997 as Private Law 105-1.⁵ Meili testified before the Senate Banking Committee and became, for American audiences, the Swiss whistleblower who had stood up to his bank. In Switzerland he was regarded by many as a man who had broken the law. He returned to Switzerland in 2009.

For the Union Bank of Switzerland the affair was a disaster of communication. Its head, Robert Studer, had described on television the sums in dormant accounts as “peanuts”, a word that now seemed to confirm every accusation of indifference.⁶ The destruction of documents also undermined the argument, repeated by the banks throughout the controversy, that their records supported their low estimates. If documents were being shredded in 1997, critics asked, what had been destroyed in the preceding fifty years? The Volcker Committee would later give a measured answer to that question. In January 1997, however, the affair gave the plaintiffs in New York, who had filed their actions a few months earlier, a narrative that no legal argument could match.

The Meili affair also illustrates a recurrent theme of this book: the tension between the duty of confidentiality that Swiss law imposes on banks and their staff, and the public interest in disclosure. Meili acted without any legal protection, since Swiss law at the time offered none to whistleblowers in the private sector. The federal decree of December 1996 had lifted banking secrecy only for the benefit of the Bergier Commission and its experts, which left a security guard acting on his own initiative without protection. The debate about the protection of whistleblowers in Swiss law, which has continued ever since, can be traced in part to this case.⁷

Notes

1. Wikipedia, “Christoph Meili”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christoph_Meili, which also mentions real estate records concerning property in Berlin seized under National Socialism. ↩
2. finews.com, Andreas Britt, “Night Guard Meili and How His Theft Changed Swiss Banking”, 9 January 2017, https://www.finews.com/news/english-news/25766-night-guard-meili-and-how-his-theft-changed-swiss-banking. ↩
3. The New York Times, report of 17 January 1997, reproduced at https://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Holocaust/swiss-shredding.html, on ledgers and lists of mortgaged buildings in Berlin and Breslau from 1933, 1934 and 1937 originating from the Eidgenössische Bank, whose remains UBS acquired in 1945; HLS, Püntener, “Schweizerische Bankgesellschaft (SBG)”, on the purchase of the Eidgenössische Bank in 1945, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/041819/2015-03-18/. ↩
4. swissinfo.ch, “Christoph Meili returns – as hero or villain?”, https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/life-aging/christoph-meili-returns-as-hero-or-villain/7330344. ↩
5. Congressional Research Service, RL30262 (as above), entries for 19 May and 29 July 1997. ↩
6. finews.com, Britt (as above). ↩
7. Federal Office of Justice, “Kündigungsschutz / Whistleblowing”, https://www.bj.admin.ch/de/kuendigungsschutz-whistleblowing: on 5 March 2020 the National Council refused for the second time to enter into the Federal Council’s bill 13.094 on the protection of whistleblowers. The link between that debate and the Meili case is an assessment of the author. ↩

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.