Swiss top court upholds Credit Suisse bonus cuts for former executives

A ruling on the 2023 bonus cuts

The Federal Supreme Court in Lausanne has found that the Swiss government was entitled to cut unpaid bonuses for senior Credit Suisse managers. The judgment is dated 16 September 2026 and was published on Thursday, 15 October 2026. It sided with the Confederation and UBS, which had appealed a 2025 decision by the Federal Administrative Court, and it set that earlier ruling aside. The Federal Finance Department's order from 2023 therefore stands.

How the cuts were ordered

Two months after UBS took over Credit Suisse in a state-backed rescue, the Federal Finance Department (EFD), acting on instructions from the Federal Council, cut or cancelled outstanding bonuses on 23 May 2023. The measure affected about 1,000 managers on the bank's top three management levels and involved 62 million francs, according to NZZ. The executive board lost its variable pay entirely, the next level lost 50 percent and the level below lost 25 percent. The cuts applied both to bonuses already promised but not yet paid and to payments that would have arisen later. Twelve managers filed appeals against the order.

The court's reasoning

The Federal Administrative Court had concluded in 2025 that the bonuses were contractually guaranteed and that the law offered no clear basis for interfering with them. The Federal Supreme Court reached a different conclusion, pointing to Article 10a of the Banking Act. That provision allows the government to ban variable pay in whole or in part when a systemically important bank receives direct or indirect state aid. According to Swissinfo, the phrase 'for the duration of such support' refers to the period in which the government may act, not to how long a measure lasts. The judges also read the wording that variable pay may be 'limited' as meaning more than a simple postponement of payment. The court cited the government's message to parliament on too-big-to-fail rules, which said measures could extend to revoking variable pay once state aid is granted. It also weighed the guarantee of up to 100 billion francs that the Confederation provided, and held that the later repayment of liquidity aid was not decisive. In the court's view, public money should not finance bonuses for the business periods in which the crisis arose.

SRF reports that the court stressed the cuts were not a punishment of individual managers, so no personal responsibility for the crisis had to be proven. The provision, in the court's reading, has a preventive purpose rather than a penal one.

Reaction and wider debate

Blick framed the ruling as a win for Finance Minister Karin Keller-Sutter of the FDP, who has become known as an 'iron lady' of bank regulation since the Credit Suisse collapse. Blick also described a months-long public dispute between Keller-Sutter and UBS chief executive Sergio Ermotti over new capital requirements. Blick cited 32 billion in bonuses paid over the ten years before the collapse, despite a loss of 3.2 billion francs, and said UBS was likely to pay out more bonuses in 2026 than in the previous year, given high profits. SRF notes that the Federal Council has since presented proposals to tighten rules for large banks, and that the judgment does not end the debate about the responsibility of bank managers.

The sequence of events

The case runs from the March 2023 crisis at Credit Suisse to the publication of the judgment on 15 October 2026. The key dates are set out below.