Bär & Karrer

Bär & Karrer returns to the GIR 100 for the first time in six years thanks in part to its work on many high-profile corruption cases that have touched Switzerland, including those involving 1MDB, Petrobras, Fifa and Petróleos de Venezuela.  

The firm

Switzerland-based Bär & Karrer is a 170-lawyer strong corporate law firm operating out of four offices across Switzerland. Its investigations practice began in the 1990s when Andreas Länzlinger, who is still a partner in the firm, helped trace the stolen assets of Holocaust victims being held by Swiss banks. Since then, the firm has established itself as a big player in the Swiss investigations market. In total, the firm has 12 partners and 15 associates in its core investigations team.  

Länzlinger previously served for the Swiss government as a public prosecutor, a judge and an investigating judge for the Swiss army. He has acted for financial institutions in high-profile foreign tax settlements. Stupp has a significant overseas regulatory defence practice and is also the vice-chairman of the board of directors at Goldman Sachs’s Swiss subsidiary.

The firm has four Who’s Who Legal: Investigations nominees: Länzlinger, partners Saverio Lembo and Andrew Garbarski in Geneva, and partner Eric Stupp in Zurich. Lembo and Stupp are also Who’s Who Legal: Business Crime Defence nominees. Garbarski is also listed as a future leader in investigations.

Lembo is leading the firm’s representation of various sporting bodies in cross-border investigations. He acts as Europe’s regional representative to the International Bar Association’s criminal law committee, and also co-chairs the American Bar Association’s international anti-money laundering committee.

Garbarski, a specialist in complex financial crime and asset recovery matters, was recently appointed to the Swiss Justice Ministry’s working group on modernising the country’s administrative criminal law system.

The firm grew its investigations partnership in January 2021 by promoting Zurich-based Pascal Hachem and Laura Widmer, an employment investigations specialist, to partner.

Recent events

The firm’s prowess in Switzerland is exemplified by it being instructed by two of football’s biggest organisations in connection to one of the world’s most famous corruption scandals in recent years.

GIR reported in 2019 that Fifa had swapped out rival firm Niederer Kraft Frey in favour of Bär & Karrer to represent the organisation in a corruption investigation by Brooklyn federal prosecutors and the Swiss Office of the Attorney General (OAG) into allegations of corruption by executives within the world football body. The firm continues to act for Fifa in this matter, alongside Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison, and helped the organisation secure damages from its former general secretary Jerôme Valcke after he was convicted in Switzerland in 2020 of falsifying documents.

Lembo and Anne Berthod represent the South American Football Confederation (Conmebol) in relation to the Swiss Office of the Attorney General’s (OAG) recovery of 36 million Swiss francs from two former Conmebol executives in connection with alleged corruption. The OAG said in October 2020 that it planned to return the money to Conmebol after seizing the Swiss-held funds of the organisation’s former president and its general secretary.

The firm often partners with US firms to assist companies facing DOJ investigations with a Swiss dimension. It recently acted for insurer Swiss Life alongside US counsel at Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz in a $77 million deferred prosecution agreement that the company reached with the US Justice Department in May after admitting that it conspired with US citizens to evade tax by hiding assets in offshore accounts.

Network

Bär & Karrer has four offices across Switzerland in Zurich, Geneva, Lugano and Zug, as well as an extensive international network of correspondent law firms.

Clients

The firm currently acts for football bodies Fifa, Uefa and Conmebol in various high-profile cases. Bär & Karrer has also acted for many high-profile Swiss financial institutions facing overseas investigations, including UBS and Swiss Life.

Track record

The firm handled the US criminal tax case against Swiss bank UBS that eventually led to the creation of the DOJ’s Swiss bank programme, which allowed Swiss lenders to resolve US criminal cases provided they undertook a series of measures, including paying a monetary penalty and providing US authorities with a list of all accounts linked to US parties.

In the case, UBS agreed to pay $780 million in 2009 to settle tax fraud charges brought by the DOJ and SEC. Four years later, the DOJ announced the Swiss bank programme. Since then, more than 80 financial institutions have resolved US tax investigations through the programme.

The bank had previously tapped the firm in 2003 to conduct an internal investigation into potential wrongdoing linked to its money transfers. In 2004, the US Federal Reserve fined the bank US$100 million for processing US-dollar transactions with countries subject to US sanctions, such as Cuba.

In another major financial institution investigation, Bär & Karrer carried out an internal investigation in 2015 for Basler Kantonalbank into the bank’s potential involvement in one of the largest fraud cases in Swiss history. The fraud, which was carried out by an external asset manager, caught out over 500 victims who lost around 300 million Swiss francs.