SWITZERLAND Trends and Developments Contributed by: Marc Hassberger and Jeffrey Connor, Chabrier Avocats LLC
The most consequential development came on 31 January 2025, when the Federal Criminal Court in Bellinzona convicted Trafigura and three individual defendants in a case involving bribe payments con - nected to Angolan oil contracts (currently under appeal). The court fined the company CHF3 million and ordered approximately USD145.6 million in com - pensation; Trafigura’s former chief operating officer received a 32-month sentence, partially suspended. Unlike the Gunvor and Glencore matters, which con - cluded by summary penalty orders, the Trafigura case produced a reasoned trial judgment, the first of its kind for a multinational trader in Switzerland. While the decision is subject to appeal, it provides the most detailed judicial articulation to date of how “adequate organisation” is assessed in practice. In its public communication on the 2024 reporting year, released on 3 April 2025, the OAG highlighted the summary penalty orders against international commodity companies and the first corporate trial for foreign bribery as evidence that Swiss corporate crim - inal law is effective. It also emphasised the efficiency of summary penalty orders, while signalling readiness to take cases to court where jurisprudential clarifica - tion is required or settlement is not feasible. Adequate organisation: lessons from the cases The recent Swiss cases show in concrete terms how prosecutors and courts are applying the “adequate organisation” test under Article 102 of the SCC. A recurring focal point is the handling of intermediaries and consultants. Where trading companies engaged agents who acted as conduits for bribes, but failed to perform meaningful vetting, set clear mandates, monitor performance, or control payment flows, cor - porate liability followed. The OAG’s Gunvor 2019 penalty order expressly framed the conviction as a failure to take “all the organisational measures that were reasonable and necessary” to prevent employ - ees and agents from bribing officials; the Glencore 2024 order likewise grounded liability in organisational failings regarding a third-party business partner. Taken together, these outcomes confirm that vague scopes of work, opaque offshore accounts, and unchecked beneficial ownership of counterparties are red-flag indicators of inadequate organisation in the trading context.
A second key theme is documentation and record- keeping. In practice, Swiss prosecutors (and, in the Trafigura case, the Federal Criminal Court) placed strong emphasis on contemporaneous evidence such as emails, messages, approval forms and pay - ment records to test whether internal controls actu - ally worked. Reports on the Trafigura trial show that the court reviewed extensive documentary evidence and gave significant weight to what was written at the time. In effect, if compliance steps are not properly documented, prosecutors and judges will give little or no weight to steps that are not documented when assessing the company’s organisational adequacy after the fact. Governance and top-level oversight also feature in the adequacy analysis. While the Swiss penalty orders do not prescribe a specific board workflow, international benchmarks that inform Swiss expectations (includ - ing OECD Phase 4 monitoring of Switzerland) empha - sise top-level commitment and clear organisational responsibility for anti-bribery systems. Transparency Switzerland’s compliance guidance likewise explains that companies may be held liable where they cannot demonstrate necessary and reasonable organisational measures – an expectation that, in practice, reaches board and senior-management oversight of high-risk relationships. The enforcement pattern in trading cases (where senior-management decision-making, approvals and exceptions are parsed) confirms that passive receipt of information is insufficient when prosecutors assess organisational adequacy. Perhaps the most important lesson is that adequacy is dynamic. Standards evolve with enforcement experi - ence, and the baseline against which Swiss authorities will measure programmes is higher in 2025–2026 than a decade ago. The Glencore resolution is especially instructive: the OAG recorded no proven employee knowledge of bribery yet still found the organisation inadequate in relation to a business partner’s conduct. This shows that authorities now expect the compa - nies to adopt systems capable of preventing problems before they arise, not merely detecting them after - wards. The Trafigura trial went a step further, providing the first judicial test of what adequacy means in a real- world trading context. In today’s environment, traders that do not regularly update their third-party checks,
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