Ex-Credit Suisse Risk Chief Has Swiss Criminal Case Dismissed
(Bloomberg) — Credit Suisse’s former head of compliance has avoided a criminal trial for allegedly ignoring red flags in a scandal that helped hasten the bank’s collapse, after the case was dismissed on technical grounds.
Lawyers for Lara Warner were preparing to argue in Switzerland’s Federal Criminal Court that regulators miscast her role in the so-called Tuna Bonds scandal — a $2 billion debt scheme meant to fund a Mozambican tuna-fishing fleet that instead became a global symbol of the bank’s failings.
The Swiss court on Tuesday dismissed the case and a 100,000 Swiss franc ($127,480) fine against her because the statute of limitations had expired. By failing to file a suspicious activity report between 2016 and 2018 over a $7.9 million payment from Mozambique’s government to an account in the United Arab Emirates “the defendant intentionally violated her reporting obligations” under Swiss money-laundering rules, the court said.
However, while that obligation lasts as long as assets can be traced and confiscated, the court ruled, “there is no indication as to the whereabouts of the assets transferred to the United Arab Emirates since 2017.”
Warner was fined in March 2025 by the Federal Department of Finance after regulators accused her of blocking subordinates from filing an alert and later showing “no remorse.” But the seven-year statute on her obligations expired in early 2024, a year before she was fined, the court explained in giving its reason for the dismissal.
The order dismissing the case can be appealed, but it nevertheless marks a win for Warner and her lawyers who were preparing to argued that investigators misread her position and ignored evidence that decision-making sat lower down the compliance chain.
“This dismissal is the correct and long-overdue outcome,” Roberto Dallafior, her lead lawyer, said in a statement. The fine was “was entirely baseless as it attributed decisions to Lara Warner that she did not make and were in any event disclosed and reviewed by FINMA when they were made in 2016, without objection at the time they were made,” he added.
Through her lawyer, Warner said “I am relieved by this decision and grateful that this matter has finally been resolved” and “look forward to putting this chapter behind me.”
The fallout from the Mozambique scandal was one of many that sent investor confidence in Credit Suisse plunging. Warner was dismissed from the bank along with other executives in April 2021 as it took a 4.4 billion Swiss francs writedown tied to a separate scandal. Less than two years later, UBS bought Credit Suisse in a government-brokered rescue, acquiring both its assets and legal liabilities.
UBS did reach a settlement with Mozambique over the case in 2023. A Swiss criminal probe into the case was dismissed in April after the same court ruled that UBS couldn’t be held liable for Credit Suisse’s wrongdoing in the affair, given it dates back years before its 2023 rescue.
UBS, which is not a party in the Warner case, declined to comment.
Warner is now an adviser at Starling Trust, a behavioral sciences and risk advisory firm based outside Washington DC.
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