Regulatory

On December 12, 2014, the Swiss Parliament adopted the Federal Act for Implementing the Revised Financial Action Task Force (FATF) Recommendations. The Federal Act provides new and revised provisions in the field of anti-money laundering, criminal and corporate law. The revisions mainly focus on enhanced transparency on the ownership of legal persons, the clarification and extension of the definition…

Over the past years, enforcement has become an increasingly important means for the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority FINMA to achieve its supervisory goals. In line with its stipulation to make enforcement activities more visible, FINMA, in spring 2015, for the first time published a specific report summarising its enforcement activities in 2014. In the…

Following a review of the consultation results on the draft Financial Services Act (FinSA) and the draft Financial Institutions Act (FinIA), the Swiss Federal Council decided that certain elements needed to be revised and the dispatch for submission to the Swiss Parliament be postponed until the end of 2015. By René Bösch / Benjamin Leisinger…

Never before has an opinion of a European Advocate General had such a severe impact on Switzerland as the one published on the request for preliminary ruling in the so-called OMT case, a government bond-buying program announced by the ECB in 2012. Only one day after the Advocate General basically rejected the legal concerns of…

The two year transitional period applicable to the rules for the marketing of non-Swiss funds to unregulated qualified investors in Switzerland under the amended Collective Investment Schemes Act (CISA) ended on 28 February 2015. As from 1 March 2015, a Swiss representative and a Swiss paying agent must be appointed and Swiss law governed distribution…

The partial revision of the Swiss Insurance Supervision Ordinance (ISO) initiated by the Federal Finance Department (FFD) in 2014 will enter into force on 1 July 2015. The revision focuses primarily on the themes of solvency, qualitative risk management and disclosure. This article shall give an overview on the various amendments, and in particular on…

The Swiss Federal Government proposes to implement a new documentation concept for public offerings of securities. Modelled after the EU Prospectus Directive, in the near future prospectuses for Swiss public offerings shall be set up to meet information requirements comparative with international standards and shall be approved ex ante. An important exemption from the ex ante…

On 28 November 2014 the Federal Council presented a preliminary draft (Vorentwurf) of the corporate law reform and started the consultation procedure which runs until 15 March 2015. The main proposals are: Implementation of the Ordinance against Excessive Compensation in Public Companies into the Code of Obligations (with tighter rules on certain points, e.g. a…

The Swiss Federal Council issued a proposal on 17 December 2014 to replace the current withholding tax on interest payments by a new paying agent tax system. The new system would be applicable to both domestic and foreign issued bonds and debentures. A Swiss paying agent would have to withhold the Swiss withholding tax, if …