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Switzerland fines Pictet for money laundering, sentences former employee
Published by Global Banking & Finance Review®
Posted on June 17, 2025
2 min readLast updated: January 23, 2026
Global Banking & Finance Review®
Company
Published by Global Banking & Finance Review®
Posted on June 17, 2025
2 min readLast updated: January 23, 2026
Pictet Bank fined $2.5M for money laundering linked to Petrobras. Former manager sentenced. Swiss prosecutors resolve the case.
ZURICH (Reuters) -The Swiss Attorney General's Office has handed a former wealth manager at Pictet Bank a six-month suspended prison sentence and fined the private bank for money laundering in a Petrobras-related probe, the government said on Tuesday.
Pictet was ordered to pay 2 million Swiss francs ($2.5 million) for failing to take all reasonable and necessary measures to prevent transfers from the account of a Brazilian public official aimed at concealing their criminal origin, the Swiss government said in a statement.
Swiss prosecutors have been working for years to identify assets and bring forward prosecutions in relation to a sprawling international corruption case linked to Brazilian state-run oil company Petrobras.
"We confirm that this matter, which involves several financial institutions, has been resolved for Pictet," Pictet said in a statement.
"It represents neither an admission of guilt nor an acceptance of liability on the part of Pictet and is not related to its asset management, asset servicing or alternative assets entities," the private bank added.
The payments were made between June 2010 and May 2013 from an account held in the name of an offshore firm whose beneficial owner was a Petrobras employee, the Swiss government said.
The former Pictet manager approved transfers of assets that originated from corrupt payments for the operation of oil rigs and totaled more than $4.1 million, the government added.
He was found guilty of aggravated money laundering the government alleged was made possible by organisational shortcomings at Pictet.
Brazil's so-called Car Wash probe, known in Portuguese as Lava Jato, began in 2014 with the arrest of a currency dealer and mushroomed into the country's biggest ever graft scandal, in which hundreds of executives, officials and politicians have been convicted.
($1 = 0.8126 Swiss francs)
(Reporting by Ariane Luthi;Editing by Dave Graham and Emelia Sithole-Matarise)
Pictet Bank was fined 2 million Swiss francs for failing to take reasonable measures to prevent money laundering related to transfers from a Brazilian public official's account.
The former wealth manager at Pictet Bank received a six-month suspended prison sentence for aggravated money laundering.
The case is linked to a corruption scandal involving the Brazilian state-run oil company Petrobras, where corrupt payments were funneled through Pictet Bank.
Pictet confirmed that the matter has been resolved but emphasized that it does not represent an admission of guilt or liability.
The payments in question were made between June 2010 and May 2013 from an account held by an offshore firm linked to a Petrobras employee.
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