Swiss Police Raid Credit Suisse Offices As Greensill Investigation Heats Up

Unsurprisingly given the large number of municipalities in Germany, Switzerland and elsewhere that invested in Greensill, either via Credit Suisse and its ‘trade finance’ funds, or by placing deposits with Greensill’s Bavaria-based bank. In the end, plenty of small towns were swindled by Greensill’s downfall – it wasn’t all wealthy individuals and sovereign wealth funds.

And so, as the months have passed since Greensill filed for administration, prosecutors around the world have been ramping up investigations into the firm with a focus on fraud or wrongdoing perpetrated by its leaders, or its enablers (including banks like Credit Suisse that helped package and sell Greensill’s assets in their “trade finance” funds.

Well, with the noose presumably closing around Greensill, the FT reports that Swiss police have raided the offices of Credit Suisse and seized documents relating to the collapse of Credit Suisse’s $10 billion in Greensill funds.

The raid was ordered by Zürich’s cantonal public prosecutor. Credit Suisse acknowledged the raid to the FT, but the bank insisted CS wasn’t the target of the probe, and was merely cooperating with the probe into Greensill.

However, the notion that CS might bear some criminal liability here isn’t all that far-fetched. It has already been established that Credit Suisse sold the trade-finance funds – packed with assets that were essentially a collection of invoices – to top clients by touting their high ratings and supposedly low risk structure.

Long before Greensill’s collapse, it was revealed by the FT that the CS trade finance funds might be functioning, in reality, as a way to secretly (and perhaps illegally)  prop up SoftBank Vision Fund portfolio companies.

Even the FT acknowledges that charges against Credit Suisse would be a problem for CS, especially on top of all the class-action lawsuits that have been filed.

A number of class-action lawsuits have already been filed by angry investors. Criminal charges by Swiss authorities would be a significant fillip for their legal efforts, in which questions have been raised over the tight relationship between Credit Suisse and Greensill, and the amount of due diligence the bank did.

Whatever prosecutors find in this trove of documents, we’re certainly waiting with baited breath to see what prosecutors in this case do next.