(Sept 8): A former president of the Swiss Bankers’ Association was found guilty of bribery of a public official for paying 82 million Swiss francs (RM410.12 million) in kickbacks to a Kuwaiti pension-fund boss to secure US$600 million (RM2.42 billion) for his bank to invest.

Pierre Mirabaud was also convicted of aggravated money laundering for having hidden the origins of many of those illicit payments and cleared of a separate document-forgery charge in a judgment at Switzerland’s top criminal court on Tuesday.

Recognisable by his curly moustache, Mirabaud was a longtime partner at his family’s eponymous Geneva private bank, founded in 1819. The banker, who ran the SBA from 2003 to 2009, was sentenced by the court to a two-year suspended sentence with a two-year probation. That means he won’t serve any prison time unless he violates the terms of his probation. 

Mirabaud had agreed to what’s known as a simplified procedure in which he admitted wrongdoing to expedite the criminal proceeding and in the hope of securing a lesser sentence. Mirabaud was also ordered to pay 114,000 francs in legal and court costs. 

Kuwait’s Public Institution for Social Security, as the small Gulf state’s fund is formally known, was run by a banker named Fahad Al Rajaan from 1984 to 2013. His assets were frozen and a request for his arrest was issued with Interpol following criminal complaints into his tenure at the fund. He was convicted on corruption and embezzlement charges by a Kuwaiti court in 2016 and died in London in 2022. 

The fund brought in a new management team in 2017 following the Al Rajaan scandal and exited more than US$20 billion in questionable deals. The affair was the subject of a London high court trial last year, for which a verdict has yet to be delivered.

Uploaded by Arion Yeow