Switzerland’s attorney general has filed criminal charges against UBS and a former Credit Suisse compliance officer, alleging failures to prevent money laundering linked to the long-running Mozambique “tuna bonds” scandal, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The case stems from a series of debt deals arranged by Credit Suisse beginning around 2013, in which the bank helped state-owned companies in Mozambique raise some $2 billion to finance fishing vessels and maritime equipment, the newspaper said. When the loans soured and the debt could not be repaid on schedule, investigators uncovered what they describe as a vast fraud involving bribes and undisclosed fees tied to the transactions.
UBS, which acquired Credit Suisse in a state-engineered rescue in 2023, is being charged as the legal successor to Credit Suisse and held criminally liable for the alleged money-laundering failures, the news outlet said.
An unnamed female compliance officer has been separately charged in connection with $7 million sent from Mozambique’s Finance Ministry into a Credit Suisse account.
Although the compliance officer was “aware of numerous indications that the funds received from Mozambique could be of felonious origin, she recommended that the management board of CS and the Credit Suisse Group should not file a report to the Money Laundering Reporting Office Switzerland (MROS), but instead terminate the commercial relationship,” Swiss prosecutors said in a statement.
By recommending the termination and failing to investigate the transactions, the compliance officer allowed the suspicious funds to be moved abroad and laundered, the Swiss office said.
The attorney general’s office also criticized what it described as serious weaknesses in the bank’s risk-management and compliance systems at the time, including defects in internal directives.
The suspected money laundering was not reported by Credit Suisse until 2019, several years after the transactions, and only once the bank knew it was under criminal investigation in the U.S., according to the Swiss attorney general.
Later that year, three former Credit Suisse bankers arrested in London pleaded guilty in federal court in Brooklyn to charges related to the Mozambique transactions, the Journal reported.
The new charges add to a legal saga that has already cost Credit Suisse hundreds of millions of dollars. In 2021, the bank agreed to pay $475 million to regulators in the U.S., U.K. and Switzerland to resolve claims that it misled some investors involved in the Mozambique debt deals and pleaded guilty in the U.S. to a charge of wire-fraud conspiracy, according to the report.
Switzerland’s financial regulator also restricted Credit Suisse’s ability to extend new loans in countries viewed as highly exposed to corruption.
Read more from the Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland
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