Each time he landed a six-figure commission for his tiny Swiss bank, Paul-Michel von Merey was known to thunder through the open-plan office close to Lake Zurich, loudly ringing a cow bell in celebration.
The regular clanging reflected a lucrative seam his firm was mining. MBaer Merchant Bank, which von Merey co-founded in 2018, would sometimes charge clients as much as ten times the going rate to process payments, according to people familiar with the matter, in particular transactions that other banks wouldn¡¯t handle.
But even as the firm was named among the ¡°most prosperous¡± Swiss private banks last year by a local wealth-management event, its end was near. The alleged facilitation of money laundering brought the small Swiss operation to the attention of U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who on the eve of war with Iran late last month, effectively forced it to shut down.
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