Pierre Mirabaud is convicted in Bellinzona. The bank that carries his name was not a party.

On 8 September 2026 the Federal Criminal Court in Bellinzona found Pierre Mirabaud guilty of bribing foreign public officials and of money laundering, and handed him a two-year suspended prison sentence. Mirabaud, 77, was a partner at the Geneva private bank Mirabaud & Cie and ran the Swiss Bankers Association from 2003 to 2009. He had accepted the central facts before the hearing, which let the court deal with the matter under an accelerated procedure. Reuters reported that proceedings lasted about half a day.

What the indictment set out

The Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland alleged that Mirabaud made hundreds of payments totalling CHF 82.3m (roughly $101.7m) to a Kuwaiti government official between 2000 and 2012, and that the payments brought $595.2m of business to the bank. According to finews, the official was Fahad Al-Rajaan, then director general of Kuwait’s Public Institution for Social Security, who placed part of the institution’s funds with the bank, some of it in Mirabaud-managed funds. SWI swissinfo.ch, citing Keystone-SDA, put the sum placed at more than $500m. Al-Rajaan died in London in 2022 and was convicted in absentia in Kuwait.

Mirabaud retired from the bank in 2009 and stayed on as a consultant until 2012. Prosecutors asked for 24 months rather than the maximum five years, citing his age, his clean record and his cooperation. His lawyer, Saverio Lembo, said the sentence reflected that cooperation. Swiss sentences are generally suspended where the court sees no risk of repetition.

FINMA dealt with the bank separately, and earlier

Mirabaud & Cie was not a party to the criminal case and declined to comment. In 2024 FINMA confiscated CHF 12.7m of unlawfully generated profits from the bank over breaches of financial market law and of its anti-money-laundering obligations. Reuters reports that the FINMA matter concerned relationships that at one point represented close to a tenth of the bank’s assets under management, and involved a businessman accused of tax evasion who has since died. FINMA named no individuals, so that case and this one are not established as the same set of facts.

The bank was founded in Geneva in 1819 and is run by the seventh generation of the founding family. It continues to operate under the name of the man sentenced this week.

What it means for family offices

A family that banked here during those years was buying a partner, a name and two centuries of continuity. The conduct that has now produced a criminal conviction attached to the first of those and left the other two standing. Counterparty checks built on institutional reputation would have found nothing, and the payments ran for twelve years before the OAG opened a file.

Then there is the timing. The payments stopped in 2012, FINMA acted in 2024, the judgment came in 2026. Adverse-media screening catches the last of those. A search run at almost any point across the intervening fourteen years would have come back clean, which is worth remembering by anyone whose adviser review consists of an annual name search.

The harder question sits on the introduction itself. One relationship brought hundreds of millions of dollars of public pension money into a private bank, and the partners shared in what it earned. Where a single relationship carries an outsized share of a firm’s book, how it was won belongs in the due diligence file and not only in the commercial review.

Sources: Reuters; SWI swissinfo.ch; finews.