Pierin Vincenz and mixed-race Switzerland

When Pierin Vincenz appeared before his judge, he not only defended himself, but also his very Swiss principle. Vincenz had always been a gray area businessman. In the past few days, not without pride, he put it this way: “I can tell you that I haven’t differentiated between business and vacation for twenty years.” In fact, leisure and business follow different laws. Pierin Vincenz, the former boss of Raiffeisen, dissolved them until he could apparently decide for himself which laws were currently in force.

Back in Australia, when he used expenses for his family holidays, he finally had to study the Australian counter and customer hall concept for Raiffeisen: “Australia was known for a very intensive branch network!” Back then in the cabarets he generously paid rounds, even if he visited them alone: ​​everyone in the round was a potential customer! And back then on the golf trip that he billed Raiffeisen for? “As part of the corporate customer strategy, we have turned to the Golf,” said Vincenz.

In his story, vacation and corporate client strategy merge into one big gray area where everything is a matter of judgment. To this day, Vincenz leaves no doubts about his discretion.

The second major Swiss economic process of the century began this week in the theater of the Zurich Volkshaus. If the Swissair trial in the winter of 2007 led to the abysses of the corporate elite, then the Vincenz trial would lead to the abysses of the SME elite. Because the case of Pierin Vincenz is not an isolated case, as the first days at the Zurich District Court showed – it is the partly grotesque caricature of a well-known Switzerland: the mixed-race Switzerland.

If you wanted to mark this country on a world map, you would have to shade it gray. Switzerland is designed so that everything mixes: the militia principle brings the same people together in business and politics, in clubs and associations, brings a network in good moments and a felt in bad moments. The manageable size promotes informal agreements and non-transparent agreements at the same time. Federalism creates anarchy in the federation and small monarchies in the valleys and in the villages. Switzerland, a gray area.

The old size

Pierin Vincenz, born on May 11, 1956 in Chur, grew up in this country. He was the antagonist of the big foreign bankers on Paradeplatz, who stood for a globalized future for Switzerland. Vincenz brought the sovereignty of interpretation back to the gymnasiums in the country, where the general meetings of the Raiffeisen banks took place. Wherever he appeared, he made it clear that in the future, too, it would not only be a matter of forms and regulations, but also of people. His law was common sense.

At the end of his time as head of Raiffeisen, he revealed the light gray side of his principle on a podium in Lucerne: “It’s crazy today! First, the head of communications comes to me and says: ‘You’re not allowed to talk directly to journalists, we always want to be there!’ – Then the customer manager comes and says: ‘You’re no longer close enough to the people!’ We have to be careful that the communication people don’t always tie us back!»

A short time later, research and investigations revealed the dark gray side of his principle: According to the indictment, Pierin Vincenz charged Raiffeisenbank almost 600,000 francs in improper expenses. He mixed private and business trips and private and business transactions in such a way that he, not Raiffeisen, benefited from them. In a double game, he and his closest business partner made a profit of CHF 24.4 million, the prosecutor said in his plea.

The presumption of innocence applies – for Pierin Vincenz as well as for the other participants in this process, which became more and more interesting after the initial excitement about the “scandal banker” (“Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”): because with each additional survey, the system behind the individual case appeared clearer.

Two men, two sides

Pierin Vincenz and the other suspects were scattered throughout the theater, but they shared a similar perspective on the court, on the public.

Ferdinand Locher, a sporty real estate entrepreneur from Lake Geneva, to whom the process seemed so alien that he leafed through the prosecutor’s thick pleading like a car brochure and then went back to his cell phone – he perhaps best verbalized this perspective: “I am about the prosecution I’m still perplexed,” he said of himself, and then of his company: “In thirty years we’ve implemented countless projects for a billion francs without ever having a single complaint. I didn’t even know what cheating was before.”

The judge then asked him whether he wanted to sell the Thun football stadium to Pierin Vincenz and Raiffeisen and whether a commission would have been paid for this. There was talk of 2 million francs for Vincenz. The resilient material is a chat with an intermediary. Ferdinand Locher said: “It was an SMS chat somewhere between 11 p.m. and midnight. (. . .) When an intermediary presents you with a buyer, a commission is absolutely normal. Certainly not an attempt at bribery. Even though it’s in the Bernese Oberland, we’re not completely fools either. (. . .) It’s not abnormal in real estate.” In the end, the sale didn’t work out.

The agent Locher chatted with was Beat Stocker, a very smart and very close former business partner of Pierin Vincenz. Stocker is accused of having defrauded Raiffeisen together with Vincenz. They are said to have initially participated privately and secretly in startups, only to later sell them to Raiffeisen and the credit card company Aduno for their own benefit, according to the indictment. Two men on either side of the negotiations.

Beat Stocker said that he would no longer hide anything, but that he would continue to act in the same way today: “An entrepreneur must also take responsibility once in a while and not always leave it to his society. It’s called ‘skin in the game’ today.” Because, as he said later, someone had to be accountable, “corporate law or not”.

It was in the gray area of ​​this risk, Stocker probably wanted to say, that he first developed his entrepreneurial energy. That was the main tone in court in the past few days: the entrepreneur, always at risk, always ready to seize new opportunities, to generate new jobs and new added value, does not protect himself with the law, but on the contrary dares the unknown, that Inscrutable, the impossible.

Anyone who knows SMEs in Switzerland even a little knows that on the one hand these companies form the economic backbone of Switzerland – and on the other hand that their entrepreneurs, perhaps precisely because they are used to taking risks, keep going to the limits and beyond: themselves Arranging prices with other entrepreneurs, paying only a small salary and accounting for everything else about the company in order to optimize taxes, getting upset about politics and its maximally slow, maximally legitimized functioning.

In the evening at the aperitif

Pierin Vincenz first worked for what was then the bank association. When he later switched to Raiffeisen, at that time a conservative farmer’s bank, he said: “At Raiffeisen I have a lot more design options than at a big bank.”

In retrospect, his rise and his fall lie in this sentence. He led the bank to great success as an employee, until he finally succumbed to the illusion he had created that he was actually not an employee but the owner: what was in his mind had to be in the bank’s mind.

Pierin Vincenz provided one of the most bizarre examples of this when the court concerned an evening at the Hotel Storchen in Zurich. Vincenz had made an acquaintance on the Tinder dating app and invited the woman to the hotel. He charged Raiffeisen 700 francs via his company credit card. In the investigation, he said it was a job interview.

“Is it normal,” asked the judge, “that a CEO recruits via Tinder and holds the interview alone, in the evening over an aperitif?”

“Well, I had met a lot of people personally,” said Vincenz, “I wanted to convince them of Raiffeisen, especially in the cities where we weren’t so present, and I was out and about day and night.”

“martial”

One of the prosecutors said on the second day of the hearing before he began his plea: “It’s not about an overall balance of the life’s work of the people concerned.”

At the end of their statements, several of the accused emphasized that they were entrepreneurs with good intentions. Beat Stocker, marked by multiple sclerosis, sat in the front of the judge’s chair for a long time during an exhaustive questioning. At the beginning of the indictment, he was still considered a mastermind in the shadow of Pierin Vincenz, now he had humanized himself into a thoughtful, self-critical suspect. He said: «I never thought about enriching myself personally. (. . .) My hair stands on end. I would have thought that they would have gotten to know me better during the investigation. But when I read the Ingress, I get sick.”

The legal accusations are included in the indictment. The judge said to Stocker: “That is the wording of the law.”

“But he’s martial,” replied Beat Stocker.

The accused had tried to paint their entrepreneurial world as gray as possible in the surveys. How the judges see this world is not yet known. But the indictment says it all in black and white.