Trial against ex-Raiffeisen boss Vincenz: the surprises

In the afternoon at 4:15 p.m. even the presiding judge Sebastian Aeppli had to apologize to the accused. When they returned to court at 4 p.m., they were unable to return to the large theater in the Volkshaus Zurich for fifteen minutes, but had to wait outside the door together with the photographers and press representatives. A crowd of onlookers took photos, especially around Pierin Vincenz and his defense attorney Lorenz Erni.

That should no longer happen, said Judge Aeppli. From the second day of the trial, the accused are now allowed into the room ten minutes before the press. The six suspects present had been exposed to an American-style gauntlet early in the morning. With no way to use a back entrance, they had to make their way through dozens of spectators to get the process started.

Judge Aeppli is determined to conduct the trial against all odds now. This conclusion can be drawn after the first day of the trial. The media interest in the process is huge, as many as 60 journalists attended. With the virus, the court also has an opponent who remains completely unpredictable.

It became known on Monday evening that the co-defendant Andreas Etter is in isolation because of Corona. Etter is one of the founders of the private equity firm Investnet, and the takeover by Raiffeisen from 2012 is one of the main points of the indictment.

In fact, as confirmed by an experienced criminal lawyer, a court must conduct all questioning in the presence of all the accused. So the trial should have been postponed because of Etter. But the judge has room for maneuver here. In this way, all the defendants could have commented on the matter in detail. The right to be heard is also granted because Etter can speak on February 9th, the trial attorney continued. The three judges also rejected the application by Erni and Beat Stocker’s lawyer Andreas Blattmann to postpone the trial. Etter himself had his defense attorney, Cornel Borbély, confirm that he agreed with the court’s decision.

Another preliminary question from Blattmann, who explained that Stocker had not been given full access to the files, was dismissed with just a few words. There are significant differences in the version of the defense files compared to that of the court. In addition, the public prosecutor’s office carried out a pre-triage of the file material. The 500 federal folders handed over to the court represent only part of all the documents confiscated.

The rejection of the preliminary question by Peter Wüst’s defense attorney Fatih Aslantas, who criticized the work of the public prosecutors in wiretapping the suspects (see box), was probably also sensitive. Wüst suffers from severe dementia and has been declared unfit to stand trial. The case against him is likely to be dropped at the end of the trial.

“I didn’t want it to be known that I was investing privately in the SME sector”

The defense always had little chance of swaying the district court with the pretrial questions. But these are important preliminary questions, and the court probably exposes itself to additional points of attack with individual decisions. At least the time pressure was eased, so in addition to the five trial days previously planned, four new dates were scheduled for March.

After the rejection of all preliminary questions, Pierin Vincenz made his big personal appearance, which was eagerly awaited by everyone. As is already known from the interrogation, he declared the charging of some private expenses at Raiffeisen’s expense as an “error” and thus pleaded partially guilty to this set of charges.

The second part dealt with the main allegation of the indictment. For the first time, Vincenz publicly commented on the controversial company transactions in which he and his co-defendants are accused of fraud and possibly unfaithful business management. He was not always able to remember the exact details and data of the individual transactions, which is not necessarily to be expected from the head of the third-largest systemically important banking group in the country. In his core statement, however, he remained concise with his previous statements in the interrogations with the police and public prosecutor’s office.

«Why did I specifically not take this money? That was in my nature.”

Regarding the Commtrain case – the start-up was bought by the credit card company Aduno in April 2007 – Vincenz stated that he was involved privately at the time and confirmed that he had not informed anyone within Raiffeisen or Aduno about it. ‘That was fifteen years ago. I was young and had no experience,” he said. “I assumed that all the bodies involved would do it correctly,” Vincenz continued, who explained that he had been totally passive at the time. “I didn’t want it to be known that I was investing privately in the SME sector,” so he tried to do it discreetly.

Vincenz and Stocker have always insisted that the disputed payments between them were not bribes from clandestine transactions. But a loan from Stocker to Vincenz, who, according to the accused, repeatedly suffered from liquidity bottlenecks. The judges inquired more deeply about this, so they found it incomprehensible that Vincenz brought up money difficulties with Stocker when he had assets in the millions on his account in Liechtenstein. Vincenz emphasized that he preferred Stocker’s low-interest loan to liquidating long-term real estate or securities. When asked, he then emphasized: “Why did I specifically not take this money (in his account) (instead of Stocker’s)? That was in my nature.”