Pierin Vincenz's appeal trial opens in Zurich

The appeal trial of former Raiffeisen chief executive Pierin Vincenz and his co-defendants opened on Monday morning before the cantonal court in Zurich, with a large public in attendance. In 2022 Vincenz was sentenced to three years and nine months in prison, in particular for fraud, criminal mismanagement and passive bribery. His former business partner Beat Stocker, who had run the credit card issuer Aduno, now Viseca, was given four years.

Hearings are scheduled until 21 August. Given the complexity of the case, it is not yet known when the verdict will come.

At the centre of the charges are several company acquisitions. According to the prosecution, the two main defendants enriched themselves unlawfully by taking stakes in those companies, then arranged for them to be bought by Raiffeisen or Aduno. The manoeuvre is said to have brought them profits running into millions.

A second strand concerns the former banker's expenses. The public prosecutor accuses him of using corporate credit cards for private purposes, charging the bank for visits to strip clubs and trips to Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. The indictment describes this spending as a «Tour de Suisse nel mondo a luci rosse» (a Tour de Suisse through the red-light world). In court Vincenz has always justified it as work on business relationships.

A long procedural battle

The appeal follows years of legal wrangling. In February 2024 the cantonal court annulled the first-instance verdict for procedural flaws: the indictment, 356 pages long, was judged needlessly verbose and detailed, to the point of making an effective defence difficult. It had also, the court said, not been fully translated for a French-speaking co-defendant. The file therefore went back to the public prosecutor to draft a new one.

The prosecution challenged that successfully. At the start of 2025 the Federal Supreme Court ruled the document admissible, restored the validity of the first verdict and sent the case back to the cantonal court to examine its substance. In the spring of this year the defendants' lawyers asked for a further postponement of the appeal trial, citing appeals still pending in Lausanne. The request was rejected.

The former chief executive's private finances have changed in the meantime. A holiday villa of his in Morcote was sold at a judicial auction for around four million francs. His house in Niederteufen, in Appenzell Ausserrhoden, was also sold, raising some ten million.

The case surfaced in 2016. Revelations by Inside Paradeplatz journalist Lukas Hässig triggered investigations into Raiffeisen's shareholdings in four companies later taken over by the St Gallen bank, and into the relationship between Vincenz and Stocker.