Switzerland prosecutor says outdated rules let white-collar cases expire

Switzerland’s bid to police white-collar crime is running into a problem that can be fatal for prosecutors: time. Stefan Blättler, the country’s top financial-crimes prosecutor, said outdated procedures are allowing complex cases to drag on until statutes of limitation expire, a weakness that is especially jarring in a global wealth-management center built on speed, discretion and legal precision.

The most recent example was Lara Warner, the former Credit Suisse compliance chief, whose case ended on May 26 after the Federal Criminal Court of Switzerland found the statute of limitations had run out in a money-laundering case tied to Mozambique’s tuna-bond scandal. The Swiss finance ministry had already fined Warner 100,000 Swiss francs in 2025, but that penalty was cancelled once the criminal proceedings were dismissed.

A second high-profile case followed the same pattern. On April 28, the Federal Criminal Court discontinued the money-laundering trial against Gulnara Karimova, the daughter of Uzbekistan’s former president Islam Karimov, after concluding that no judgment could be reached before the limitation period expired. Karimova was unable to leave Uzbekistan in time, and other reporting has said she remains barred from leaving the country and is serving a 13-year sentence there.

Blättler said the problem is not only legal but technical. He described a system still shaped by pre-digital-era rules that can keep evidence sealed and make it difficult to share material quickly with foreign prosecutors, even as investigators are reviewing terabytes of data. He said people are right to ask why some criminal proceedings last 15 years, calling the delays untenable.

His office has logged some notable wins since he took over the Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland on January 1, 2022. Those results include bribery convictions involving commodity traders Trafigura and Gunvor, as well as money-laundering penalties against several banks. The office says its white-collar remit covers financial-market offences, international or intercantonal property offences and forgery of documents.

But recent enforcement gains have been offset by procedural bottlenecks. In 2025, the Office of the Attorney General fined Banque J. Safra Sarasin 3.5 million Swiss francs in a case involving aggravated money laundering tied to roughly $71 million in corrupt payments between November 2011 and May 2014, along with a 16 million Swiss franc settlement to Petrobras. Evidence in that case remained sealed for more than five years.

Switzerland’s justice ministry has said it is evaluating closer cooperation with the European Union to speed access to digital evidence. For a country that sells financial sophistication to the world, the message from these cases is stark: if the machinery of justice moves too slowly, the darkest parts of global wealth can outlast the law.