Switzerland's financial markets regulator, FINMA, has found that Julius Baer Group committed a serious violation of Swiss anti-money laundering rules, ordering the private bank to repay CHF 3 million in unlawfully earned profits to the Swiss Confederation and to bear CHF 1.3 million in procedural costs. The enforcement decision was dated November 2024 but was reported by the Financial Times on 13 May 2025.
The investigation centred on Julius Baer's handling of accounts linked to a Russian banker suspected of embezzlement and several Indian nationals during a ten-year period running from 2009 to 2019. FINMA found that the bank had continued to manage high-risk client relationships despite being confronted with repeated red flags that should, under Swiss AML requirements, have prompted a more rigorous response. The regulator determined that Julius Baer's conduct amounted to a serious rather than merely technical breach of its anti-money laundering obligations.
FINMA'S FINDINGS
According to FINMA's findings, the violations spanned a prolonged period and reflected a systemic failure to apply adequate due diligence to a set of clients whose risk profiles warranted a heightened level of scrutiny. The investigation examined the bank's conduct across accounts associated with individuals who carried material indicators of elevated money laundering risk, and found that those indicators were insufficiently acted upon over the course of a decade.
SEPARATE FROM THE SIGNA ENFORCEMENT PROCEEDINGS
The AML decision is separate from enforcement proceedings FINMA opened against Julius Baer in February 2025 relating to losses the bank incurred on lending extended to the collapsed Austrian real-estate group Signa and its founder René Benko.