Sometimes you get the feeling that the Swiss justice system works according to the motto „Good things take time“ – or in this case: „Good things take decades“. A prime example? The epic criminal proceedings against the former business and banking leader Pierin Vincenz. This case has lasted longer than some careers in top-class sport and could now be introduced as a new discipline at the Olympics: Marathon proceedings.

The saga began in 2005 when Pierin Vincenz and his accomplice acquired a majority stake in Commtrain, a start-up company for wireless credit card terminals, via their iFinance Management AG. In 2007, Aduno took over the loss-making Commtrain for around CHF 7 million. A small detail: Vincenz and his accomplice sit on the Board of Directors of Aduno and realised a net profit of CHF 2.6 million from the purchase. The second part of the saga takes place in 2018, when former Raiffeisen boss Vincenz suddenly found himself in another leading role that he would probably have liked to have done without: accused of mismanagement. Since then, the trial has moved about as fast as a sack of cement up a mountain. After the public prosecutor’s office spent around three years investigating and scrutinising not only the legality of corporate transactions, but also the handling of expenses and discovering a large number of private trips, red light visits and private legal fees, the public prosecutor’s office brought charges in 2020. The Zurich District Court handed down a sentence in 2022: 3 years and 9 months in prison for multiple embezzlement, multiple acts of mismanagement, forgery of documents, fraud, attempted fraud and passive bribery. Vincenz’s appeal against this was overturned by the High Court in 2024 due to procedural errors. The indictment was too extensive. In 2025, the Federal Supreme Court ruled that the Zurich High Court’s formalistic decision was not lawful.

Is the trial now over? No, because the Zurich High Court must now rule on the appeal itself. This judgement can in turn be appealed to the Federal Supreme Court. It is therefore quite possible that the proceedings will drag on for a few more years.

What can we learn from this? Firstly, anyone who has ever complained about long waiting times at a public authority can now relax – it could be worse. And secondly: trials that drag on for years – Vincenz is currently entering his 8th year of proceedings – are poison for trust in the justice system. Because let’s be honest: if proceedings last longer than the average life expectancy of a domestic cat, it doesn’t necessarily look like the system is well oiled. Such long proceedings are an imposition for victims and defendants – even if Vincenz can easily pass the time in his sophisticated villa with a large garden and swimming pool in Figinio, south of Lugano, or his holiday home in Andiast.