* Former Credit Suisse chief executive Tidjane Thiam’s ex-housekeeper has been acquitted of blackmail following a criminal complaint he made against her.
A court in Zurich ruled in favour of Mr Thiam’s Romanian housekeeper on Wednesday, finding she had acted within her rights after asking for contractual compensation of hundreds of thousands of francs from Mr Thiam for allegedly abusive working conditions.
The woman, whose name was withheld by the court, suffered a nervous breakdown after working in Mr Thiam’s luxury villa on Lake Zurich, the court heard.
Doctors diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of her employment, the court was told. She has a long history of working with wealthy clients around the world.
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The woman’s lawyer, Stephan Reinhardt, said in court that his client had not been able to take holiday or time off during her period working for Mr Thiam.
Events culminated in December 2018 when she claimed to have been verbally abused in the early hours one Sunday morning by Mr Thiam’s partner because the house’s boiler had stopped working, her lawyer said.
The woman claimed that the incident led to her hospitalisation.
Addressing the court, the woman said it had not been her intention to make any of these events public. She let Mr Reinhardt detail her complaints against Mr Thiam and only commented herself directly that the job had been “very stressful”. She won some compensation over holiday entitlement in a civil case against Mr Thiam last year, details of which were until now private.
The charge of blackmail pursued by the public prosecutor following a complaint brought by Mr Thiam, relates to her request for compensation.
Following her hospitalisation she was fired by Mr Thiam, the court was told. She then wrote to him claiming compensation as outlined in her contract, but Mr Thiam disputed the claim and refused to pay her.
In a message she sent to him in 2021 she asked for 587,000 Swiss francs (€621,000) and wrote that she did not wish to “harm him”. She said that if the dispute was not resolved, she would contact trade unions and mention her case to the International Olympic Committee. Mr Thiam is a member of the committee.
Mr Thiam’s lawyers argued that the letter amounted to a criminal attempt at blackmail. The judge rejected the claim, ruling that the letter was unlikely to have had any coercive effect on Mr Thiam.
Mr Thiam is currently at the Olympic Games in Paris and did not attend the court but he plans to appeal against the verdict, according to people with knowledge of the situation.
Under Swiss law, a verdict is not legally binding until all avenues of appeal have been exhausted.
Mr Thiam was ousted as chief executive of Credit Suisse in 2020, after the bank was revealed to have been spying on one of its most senior executives, Iqbal Khan.
The scandal, and subsequent claims by Mr Thiam that he had faced a hostile Swiss establishment, set the stage for a tumultuous final four years for Credit Suisse, which was acquired by UBS last year in an emergency rescue.
Following on from his high-flying financial career, Mr Thiam is preparing to run for the presidency of his native Ivory Coast in elections next year. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024
* This article has been revised on Friday, August 9th, 2024 to make it clear that the case was pursued by the public prosecutor, following a criminal complaint by Tidjane Thiam and that the ex-housekeeper won some compensation.
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