The history of the Swiss banking center is a rich one. Yet for a domestic bank to be branded a «primary money laundering concern» by the US agency FinCEN (an authority recently profiled by finews) and formally threatened with exclusion from dollar clearing is an event without precedent.
And that is precisely what befell MBaer Merchant Bank on February 26, 2026. In late February, FinCEN published its 15-page «Notice of Proposed Rulemaking» (NPRM) – the proposed measure to bar MBaer from acting as a US-dollar correspondent bank (finews reported, article in German).
The result was a wave of negative publicity for the Swiss banking center. «How a Dirty Money Trail From Venezuela to Iran Brought Down a Swiss Bank» ran the headline at «Bloomberg», for example.
A Swiss bank as a hub for Venezuelan, Russian, and Iranian dirty money: that was the formula in which the story traveled around the globe.
The Outrage Has Yet to Subside
