The man’s voice sounded drained. He was clearly shaken. “Half a dozen police officers and a prosecutor showed up at my office and my home, and seized my computer, my phone and documents. If information of public interest about banking wrongdoing can no longer be published, what is left of journalism’s role?” said Lukas Hässig, editor of Inside Paradeplatz, a widely read blog covering Zurich’s financial sector, one of the most important in Europe. Hässig is not a revolutionary, nor even an investigative journalist. For years, he has diligently and thoroughly chronicled the inner workings of Zurich’s financial world, documenting both its celebrated maneuvers and its illicit operations. Should he have refrained from reporting the latter?
Nine years after being the first to expose the wrongdoing of the flamboyant Pierin Vincenz – then chief executive of Raiffeisen bank and since convicted of fraud, aggravated breach of trust and passive private corruption – Hässig has found himself in the crosshairs of the justice system. On June 3, Zurich’s prosecutor decided that the journalist’s source protection did not outweigh the government’s desire to find the source of the leaks. The “raid” on his private residence was a first in a context of growing tension between the press and Switzerland’s powerful financial sector.
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