Friday, 17 July 2026
Dr. iur. Servatius von Tatzenberg
A quiet week on the surface — six sanctions notices and not a single press conference — but the annex is where today's real work is.
SECO touches the ISIL/Al-Qaida sanctions list twice in three months
FINMA News (de)
The Islamic State/Al-Qaida list (SR 946.231.08) got a delisting update on 1 April and another on 14 July. Two touches on the same instrument inside a hundred days is unusual — this list normally moves on the UN 1267 committee's schedule, which is slower. Worth asking your screening vendor when their last sync ran, not assuming it caught both.
Prediction: If SECO keeps this cadence, quarterly screening refreshes stop being defensible by Q4.
Five more sanctions annexes moved without anyone announcing it
FINMA News (de)
In the same stretch: Russia (Anhang 8), the Taliban list, Sudan (Anhang 2), Iran (Anhänge 12 and 14) — the same instrument our Iran-Verordnung piece covered — and a still-unnamed SR 946.231.09. None of these get a press release. All of them get checked in an audit if your list is stale.
FINMA's AMLO-FINMA consultation window closed over a month ago — the redraft is next
FINMA News (de)
The AMLO-FINMA partial revision consultation shut on 9 June. We wrote two pieces on why "no new obligations" wasn't quite the whole story — one on the beneficial-ownership clauses, one on where the burden of proof actually shifted. If your submission argued the burden-of-proof point, this is the week to check whether FINMA's summary of responses mentions it at all.
Prediction: Expect the revised circular text before FINMA's next supervisory update, not a formal consultation report.
Proton wins its surveillance appeal — the reasoning outlives the case
SWI swissinfo.ch
Proton's court win on Swiss surveillance obligations is the case behind the line we drew in our VÜPF piece: providers of derived communication services don't automatically inherit the same retention burden as classic telcos. The BVGer ruling (A-5373/2020) is five years old at its core reasoning; what's new is that it's still the line everyone cites, which tells you how little has moved since.
Cobalt's missing line in the responsible-business catalogue
SWI swissinfo.ch
The push to add cobalt to Swiss responsible-business legislation is the subject of Casimir's piece running later today — why Art. 964j OR leaves it out, and why your EU customers already wrote around the gap in the contract themselves. Read that one when it's up rather than here; I'll just flag that this is the same due-diligence catalogue question as the CSDDD item below.
Brussels' supply-chain crackdown, translated into Swiss export contracts
SWI swissinfo.ch
Same story we told in CSDDD vor NUFG: the Swiss legislature is still drafting NUFG, but your EU counterparty's due-diligence clause already binds you to CSDDD standards through the contract. This piece makes the same point from Brussels' side — the regulation doesn't need Swiss implementing law to reach a Swiss supplier, it just needs one EU customer with a compliance department.
Is a Rolex bribery? Swiss law's answer isn't about the price tag
SWI swissinfo.ch
The intuitive answer is "depends how much it's worth." The correct answer, laid out in our piece on Art. 322septies StGB, is that Switzerland never adopted a gift-value threshold — the question is whether the gift connects to an official act, full stop. A cheap gift tied to a pending decision is worse than an expensive one with no official act in sight. Compliance trainings that lead with a franc figure are teaching the wrong test.
AI is big business at Europe's borders — and the vendors are Swiss too
SWI swissinfo.ch
Read alongside our piece on the Annex III delay: the high-risk obligations for border biometrics don't kick in until 2027, but the procurement contracts for the systems are being signed now. There's a connection here worth sitting with — the same surveillance-infrastructure question shows up in the Proton case above (who has to build retention capability) and in this morning's sanctions-list churn (who has to screen against it). Three stories, one underlying question: who bears the compliance cost of a state capability nobody voted on directly.
Why pro-business Switzerland is still flirting with an investment-screening law
SWI swissinfo.ch
MBaer's appeal survived FINMA — it didn't survive Washington
FINMA News (de)
Closing the file on this one: our piece from May covered how the appeal against FINMA's licence withdrawal had suspensive effect until FinCEN's own action made the point moot. A reminder that a successful domestic appeal doesn't insulate you from a second regulator with its own timeline.
The FINMA annual conference press text was never where the story was
FINMA News (de)
Six lists, one recurring name, and not a single headline about it — which is exactly how you'd design it if you wanted nobody to notice.
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