A Swiss Bank Meets Its End, Accused of Laundering Iranian Cash

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 AG, 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.

The former office location of MBaer Merchant Bank AG bank on Alfred-Escher-Strasse in Zurich, Switzerland, on Thursday, March 19, 2026.

Photographer: Pascal Mora/Bloomberg

But even as the firm was named among the “most prosperous” Swiss private ...