The Geneva Prosecutor’s Office declined to initiate a case against OCCRP journalists after Reyl bank filed a complaint
Prosecutors in Geneva decided not to act on a criminal complaint by the private bank Reyl, which sought interrogations of three Swiss journalists who cooperated with OCCRP.
Prosecutors in Geneva have declined to open a criminal investigation after a Swiss private bank claimed that OCCRP and its media partners violated the country’s banking secrecy laws.
The decision by prosecutors was in response to a criminal complaint by Reyl & Cie S.A., which requested interrogations and searches at the offices and homes of three Swiss journalists who cooperated with OCCRP.
Reyl’s complaint came in response to a joint investigation by OCCRP and partners, which revealed how accounts belonging to several high-risk Reyl customers were being probed by Switzerland’s financial regulator. The probe took place amid a wider investigation into alleged anti-money laundering weaknesses at the Geneva-headquartered private bank.
The agency carrying out the probe declined to comment, citing the confidentiality of its supervisory activities. There is no evidence it has filed a complaint against Reyl or taken other enforcement action. Reyl did not respond to a request for comment before publication.
Under Switzerland’s Banking Act, journalists can be jailed for up to three years for publishing confidential information about a Swiss bank’s customers.
The controversial law is “an example of the criminalization of journalism,” according to Irene Khan, the United Nations special rapporteur for freedom of opinion and expression. The law has “a chilling effect and leads journalists to self-censor,” Khan told reporters in 2022.
The investigation — published in April by OCCRP, Le Monde, Paper Trail Media, and IrpiMedia — revealed how the Swiss financial regulator, FINMA, was investigating fortunes worth tens of millions of dollars held in Reyl accounts.
The accounts belonged to the daughter of Kazakhstan’s former president Nursultan Nazarbayev, the son-in-law of the late Uzbek president Islam Karimov, and a Swiss asset manager who managed companies for the children of Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev.
Reyl filed its complaint with prosecutors even before OCCRP’s article had been published, and sought a court order that would have blocked its publication.
But in their decision last month, Geneva prosecutors found that OCCRP and its partners “acted in accordance with their journalistic mission.”
“The articles revealed that REYL was subject to a FINMA procedure for anti-money laundering failures and that it included many politically exposed clients. The Public Prosecutor’s Office finds that this information concerns questions of general interest whose publication is covered by the journalists’ professional mission and their essential ‘watchdog’ role,” prosecutors wrote in their decision.
“Nothing indicates that the journalists violated their duties; therefore, they merely exercised their freedom of expression… A criminal conviction would not be necessary in a democratic society and would deter the press from discussing issues of general interest.”
Prosecutors also dismissed Reyl’s requests for searches and interrogations of three Swiss journalists working for the Tamedia group, which includes publications Tribune de Genève and Tages-Anzeiger.
“Source protection is absolute, rendering any search or sequestration ordered by the Public Prosecutor’s Office superfluous,” they wrote.
