The prosecution authorities of the Canton of Zurich

The Oberstaatsanwaltschaft and the regional offices

The Zurich public prosecution service is part of the cantonal administration and falls under the Directorate of Justice and Home Affairs. At its head stands the Oberstaatsanwaltschaft, which supervises, plans, directs and steers the entire organisation. Beneath it are five regional prosecution offices distributed over the canton (Zurich-Limmat and Zurich-Sihl in the city, Winterthur/Unterland in Winterthur, See/Oberland in Uster and Limmattal/Albis in Dietikon), a relief office (Entlastungs-Staatsanwaltschaft) for mass offences, and three cantonal offices with specialised competences. Serious violent crime is the field of Staatsanwaltschaft I. Staatsanwaltschaft II deals with priority crime, cybercrime and special investigations. Staatsanwaltschaft III, finally, is responsible for “qualified economic crime and international mutual legal assistance”.¹

The size of the service reflects that of the canton and its economy. At the end of 2025 the Zurich prosecution service employed 532 people. In the course of that year it registered 43,548 incoming cases, completed 42,629 and conducted 13,229 interviews.² The overwhelming majority of these cases concern everyday offences, from shoplifting to traffic offences, which the regional offices dispose of by summary penalty order. Ordinary economic offences of limited scope, such as an individual fraud or the misappropriation of a client’s funds by a small fiduciary, are also dealt with by the regional offices. The specialised office intervenes where a case requires particular expertise in accounting, corporate law or financial markets, or where it has an international dimension.

The leadership of the service is personal as well as institutional. In its annual report for 2025, the service is presented by its Leading Chief Prosecutor, Susanne Leu, while David Zogg is the Chief Prosecutor responsible for the cantonal offices.³ The fact that the Oberstaatsanwaltschaft publishes an annual report with case figures and portraits of its units is itself a sign of a broader development. Swiss prosecution authorities have become more visible and more willing to explain their priorities to the public, not least because economic crime cases regularly attract media attention and political criticism.

Staatsanwaltschaft III: qualified economic crime and mutual assistance

The Staatsanwaltschaft III is Zurich’s economic crime prosecutor. Its competence covers complex economic crime, incoming and outgoing requests for international mutual legal assistance, and the investigation of corruption and offences committed by public officials. In 2025 it registered 641 new cases and closed 735.⁴ The office has a long history under the same name. It was the Staatsanwaltschaft III that brought the charges in the Swissair case after the collapse of the national airline. In September 2007 the same office decided not to appeal against the acquittal of all accused, because it considered the prospects of success too low.⁵

The annual report describes economic criminal proceedings as extraordinary in several respects. They require in-depth knowledge of accounting, business administration and law, and increasingly considerable technical expertise in digital evidence and crypto-assets. Frequently, nested international structures have to be illuminated before the flow of funds can be understood. The report also illustrates the practical limits of the process with a case concerning a fund: data seized in September 2021 were still sealed more than four and a half years later, which meant that the prosecutors had no access to the central evidence and that the proceedings could not be concluded.⁶ The example explains the importance that the prosecution service attaches to the sealing reform and, conversely, why defence counsel regard sealing as the most important procedural safeguard in economic cases.

The combination of economic crime and mutual legal assistance in a single office is typical of Zurich. A considerable proportion of the requests for assistance received by Switzerland concern bank accounts and companies in Zurich. The prosecutors who execute these requests acquire a detailed knowledge of the structures that foreign offenders use. Conversely, domestic investigations into fraud or money laundering frequently require evidence from abroad. The Staatsanwaltschaft III thus sits at the junction between the domestic prosecution of economic crime and the international cooperation described in chapter I.V.

Cybercrime, money laundering and the digital case

The boundaries between economic crime and cybercrime have become fluid. Investment fraud is now conducted through fake trading platforms, business email compromise diverts corporate payments, and ransomware attacks extort crypto-assets from companies. Zurich responded by giving the Staatsanwaltschaft II a specialised competence for cybercrime. In its 2025 annual report, the service highlights the shutting down of a bitcoin mixing service that had been operated from Zurich since 2016. The volume of the service is reported at more than one billion francs in bitcoin, and operating capital of about 23 million francs was seized.⁷

The case illustrates a shift in the nature of economic crime investigations. The prosecutor of the 1990s worked through bank statements, corporate registers and correspondence. The prosecutor of the 2020s must also analyse blockchain transactions, trace assets through exchanges and mixers, and secure data held on servers abroad or in the cloud. For the financial centre, the ability of the Zurich authorities to follow crypto-assets matters in two ways. It protects the reputation of the centre that Switzerland has built for digital assets, from the Zug “Crypto Valley” to the tokenisation projects of Zurich banks. It also gives victims of crypto fraud a realistic prospect that assets passing through Swiss intermediaries can be traced and frozen, a subject to which chapter I.V returns.

The Zurich courts in economic cases

Once the prosecutor has filed an indictment, the case goes to the court of first instance, which in Zurich is the district court (Bezirksgericht) of the district concerned. The Bezirksgericht Zürich, responsible for the city, is by far the largest of the twelve district courts and hears most of the major economic cases. Depending on the sentence sought, a single judge or a panel of three judges decides.⁸ Appeals against first-instance judgments lie with the Obergericht des Kantons Zürich, which reviews the case in full on the facts and the law. From there, an appeal in criminal matters may be brought before the Federal Supreme Court, whose review of the facts is limited to arbitrariness.

Two Zurich trials show both the capacity and the limits of this system. The first is the Swissair case, which followed the grounding of the national airline in October 2001. The trial of nineteen former directors and managers took place before the district court of Bülach, since the airline’s seat lay in that district. The charges included the impairment of creditors through the reduction of assets, criminal mismanagement and false statements about commercial matters. On 7 June 2007 the court acquitted all accused on every count and awarded them about CHF 3 million in compensation for their costs.⁹ The outcome demonstrated how difficult it is to prove criminal intent in business decisions taken under the pressure of a crisis. It also left a durable impression among Zurich practitioners that a court will not convert a failed business strategy into a crime.

The second trial concerns Pierin Vincenz, the former chief executive of the Raiffeisen group, and his business partner Beat Stocker. The allegations related to undisclosed stakes in companies that were later acquired by Raiffeisen-related entities at inflated prices, as well as to private expenses charged to the employers. In April 2022 the Bezirksgericht Zürich convicted Vincenz of offences including misappropriation, criminal mismanagement and forgery of documents and sentenced him to three years and nine months’ imprisonment, while Stocker received four years.¹⁰ The Obergericht then annulled the judgment on procedural grounds, finding the 356-page indictment unnecessarily verbose and detailed and noting that it had not been fully translated into French for one of the accused. The Federal Supreme Court held the indictment admissible and remitted the case, so that the appeal hearing before the Obergericht could finally begin in August 2026.¹¹ In September 2026 the case was thus still undecided on appeal, while a final judgment of the Federal Supreme Court was not expected for several more years.

The Vincenz case has become a reference point in the Swiss debate about the length of economic criminal proceedings. Its history shows that the prosecution model does not by itself guarantee speed. Procedural objections, sealing disputes and the requirement that an indictment describe each act precisely without overburdening the defence can each add years. For a financial centre that sells legal certainty, the duration of such cases is a reputational issue in its own right, a point to which the final section returns.

Notes

1. Kanton Zürich, “Standorte der Staatsanwaltschaften”, https://www.zh.ch/de/direktion-der-justiz-und-des-innern/staatsanwaltschaft/standorte-der-staatsanwaltschaften.html. The three specialised offices and the Oberstaatsanwaltschaft share the address Güterstrasse 33, 8010 Zürich. ↩
2. Kanton Zürich, “Staatsanwaltschaft”, https://www.zh.ch/de/direktion-der-justiz-und-des-innern/staatsanwaltschaft.html. The figures are those published on the overview page for 2025. ↩
3. Staatsanwaltschaft des Kantons Zürich, Jahresbericht 2025, https://www.zh.ch/content/dam/zhweb/bilder-dokumente/themen/sicherheit-justiz/strafverfahren/jahresbericht-2025/Staatsanwaltschaft%20Jahresbericht%202025.pdf. ↩
4. Staatsanwaltschaft des Kantons Zürich, Jahresbericht 2025 (cited above), section on the Staatsanwaltschaft III. The report describes the office’s work as concerned with sophisticated fraud schemes that affect Zurich’s standing as a financial centre. ↩
5. Kanton Zürich, press release “Staatsanwaltschaft III: keine Berufung im ‘Fall Swissair’”, 7 September 2007, https://www.zh.ch/de/news-uebersicht/medienmitteilungen/2007/09/224_sairkber.html. The prosecution noted that courts are cautious in assessing complex economic matters, especially where an intent to obtain unjustified enrichment cannot be proven. ↩
6. Staatsanwaltschaft des Kantons Zürich, Jahresbericht 2025 (cited above). The report also names a specialised unit for money laundering within the Staatsanwaltschaft III and notes that the Zurich prosecution service seizes a double-digit million amount of criminal proceeds each year. ↩
7. Staatsanwaltschaft des Kantons Zürich, Jahresbericht 2025 (cited above), section on the Staatsanwaltschaft II. The office registered 557 new cases in 2025 and closed 706. ↩
8. Art. 19 para. 2 lit. b StPO allows the Confederation and the cantons to provide for a single judge except where the prosecution requests a custodial sentence of more than two years, https://www.droit-bilingue.ch/de-fr/3/31/312.0-19-22.html. Zurich has made narrower use of this option: under § 27 para. 1 GOG the single judge decides felonies and misdemeanours unless the prosecution requests, among other things, a custodial sentence of more than one year, text as reproduced by humanrights.ch, https://www.humanrights.ch/cms/upload/pdf/2020/200806_GOG_ZH.pdf. ↩
9. swissinfo.ch, “Swissair-Prozess: Freisprüche für alle Angeklagten”, 7 June 2007, https://www.swissinfo.ch/ger/demografie/swissair-prozess-freisprueche-fuer-alle-angeklagten/5935984. The prosecution had sought a sentence of twenty-eight months for the former chief executive Mario Corti, six of them unconditional. ↩
10. SRF, “Pierin Vincenz vor Gericht – eine unendliche Geschichte”, 10 August 2026, https://www.srf.ch/news/wirtschaft/ex-raiffeisen-chef-auftakt-zum-prozess-die-unendliche-geschichte-im-fall-vincenz. The report states that the expenses in question exceeded CHF 560,000, of which more than CHF 200,000 related to entertainment venues. Stocker’s sentence is reported in the Bilanz article cited in the next note. ↩
11. Bilanz, “Justizkrimi um Ex-Raiffeisen-Chef wird in Zürich neu aufgerollt”, August 2026, https://www.bilanz.ch/justizkrimi-um-ex-raiffeisen-chef-wird-in-zuerich-neu-aufgerollt/826l2y3. The report dates the Obergericht’s annulment to February 2024 and the Federal Supreme Court’s decision to early 2025. ↩

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.