When Switzerland’s Swiss Federal Administrative Court ruled in 2025 that FINMA lacked a sufficient legal basis to write down CHF 16.5 billion of Credit Suisse AT1 bonds, the decision immediately became one of the most consequential financial law judgments in recent Swiss history. The regulator appealed. The case is now pending before the Swiss Federal Supreme Court. Yet before the country’s highest judges have spoken, the ruling has already triggered an unusually sharp academic counter-offensive.

That is the legal setting into which the Bern professors stepped. Mirjam Eggen and Markus Müller published a forceful critique of the Swiss Federal Administrative Court’s reasoning in SZW. Thomas Jutzi followed in AJP with a doctrinal defence of FINMA’s position. These were not pale, archival reflections written after the smoke had cleared. They were detailed interventions against a ruling that was already on its way to the Swiss Federal Supreme Court, and both texts make plain that the authors knew the case was still moving through the appellate system.

The first curiosity is not the argument. Scholars are allowed to argue. The first curiosity is the packaging. In the visible author note of the Eggen/Müller article, readers are told the authors’ university titles, thanked for the “careful handling” of the footnotes, and given the research cut-off date. In the visible note of Jutzi’s article, readers are told his academic title, thanked an assistant, and informed that the article was completed in early January 2026. What those visible notes do not tell readers is what any serious reader would immediately want to know: Eggen previously worked at FINMA and the Federal Department of Finance, and Jutzi previously worked at FINMA. The reader learned who cared for the footnotes. The reader was left to excavate who once helped care for the rulebook.

Eggen’s regulatory biography is not obscure, tangential or ancient gossip. Her official University of Bern CV states that she worked at FINMA from 2010 to 2013 as Head of the Regulation Group and at the Federal Department of Finance from 2013 to 2015 as Expert Regulation. FINMA later noted, in announcing her appointment as Chair of the Swiss Takeover Board, that between 2010 and 2015 she oversaw work on the creation of the Financial Services Act, first at FINMA and then at the FDF. FINMA also states that members of the Swiss Takeover Board are appointed and ultimately supervised by FINMA’s Board of Directors. That is not decorative biography. That is reader-facing context.

Nor does the story end there. After the Credit Suisse collapse, the Federal Department of Finance placed Eggen on its Expert Group on Banking Stability. The group’s report identifies her as a member and recommends that the FDF, together with FINMA and the industry, examine how the Swiss market for AT1 instruments can be “rehabilitated.” So one of the scholars publicly criticising the court’s AT1 ruling also sat within the federal post-CS expert architecture discussing how to restore confidence in Swiss AT1s. Again, that does not disqualify her from writing. It does make the absence of an explicit reader-facing disclosure look less like elegance and more like academic minimalism.

Jutzi’s public record raises a parallel problem. His official University of Bern profile states that in 2012–2013 he served as “Senior Specialist for Policy and Regulation” at FINMA. A Federal Council report further states that the State Secretariat for International Finance commissioned an external opinion from him, received on 4 May 2021, and used it as a basis for its assessment. So here too, readers were not dealing with a scholar descending from pure abstraction onto a neutral battlefield. They were dealing with someone who had worked inside FINMA and later for the federal finance apparatus.

And there is an irony worth savouring. In another 2024 article, Jutzi and a co-author had no difficulty telling readers that the piece was based on a legal opinion prepared for the Asset Management Association Switzerland and expressly stating that no specific outcome had been discussed or promised in advance. So the mechanics of disclosure are not some exotic mystery in Bern. They are apparently available when needed. Just not, it seems, when the topic is FINMA, AT1s and a live Supreme Court appeal.

To be clear, no allegation is made here that UBS or FINMA commissioned or paid for these AT1 articles, and I have not found public evidence of such an arrangement in the sources reviewed. The criticism is narrower and, in some ways, more serious: readers were not given the full institutional context they needed in order to assess the authors’ proximity to the regulatory world whose legal position they were defending.

Müller’s role adds a final, almost literary, layer of irony. In 2021, he publicly argued that in questions of academic independence, the real issue is not only what contracts say but also the impression created in the eyes of the public. He specifically warned that when a major bank funds research in the very area in which it has strong interests, an appearance of dependence arises that cannot simply be neutralised by formal assurances. Quite right. Which is precisely why his co-authorship here is so awkward. Public impression, it turns out, is a splendid principle—especially when applied to other people.

The University of Bern’s own standards do not flatter this episode either. Its research-compliance guidance says that all researchers must disclose apparent, possible or actual conflicts of interest. Its scientific-integrity regulations list both the “failure to disclose vested interests” and the “non-disclosure of conflicts of interest” among integrity-related concerns. This article does not claim that a formal violation has been established. It makes a simpler point: when your own institution publicly insists on disclosure in these terms, an author note that remembers the footnote assistant but forgets the prior FINMA and FDF roles is not exactly a masterclass in transparency.

The timing only makes the omission harder to defend. These were not retrospective essays published once litigation had ended. They were pointed critiques of a non-final judgment while the leading appeal was pending and while the rest of the AT1 cases had been frozen pending the Swiss Supreme Court’s ruling. In that setting, extra candour was not an unreasonable burden. It was the minimum cost of credibility.

That is why Corriere del Ticino was on solid ground in calling the episode ethically debatable. The newspaper highlighted both the pending appeals and the discomfort created by the prior institutional link of one of the authors. The underlying question is not radical at all. It is painfully ordinary: what level of disclosure should readers expect when former FINMA officials publicly attack a non-final AT1 judgment in a live Supreme Court appeal? And how many more such eleventh-hour “scientific” interventions should readers expect before somebody in Swiss legal academia decides that the missing disclosure is, in fact, the story?

Should we now brace for more last-minute scholarly thunder from former FINMA hands, all arriving just in time to explain why the Swiss Federal Administrative Court got it wrong? What exactly is happening here? Why is so little curiosity being shown about the propriety of these interventions while the case is still pending? And on a question so relevant to Switzerland’s credibility as a rule-of-law state, why did nobody think that readers deserved the whole institutional backstory before they were invited to admire the doctrinal fireworks?

In the AT1 saga, the Swiss Federal Supreme Court will decide the law. Academia faces a much smaller test, and it should have been the easy part: if an author note can remember who polished the footnotes, it can also remember who once worked for FINMA. When the first is disclosed and the second is not, the problem is no longer doctrine. It is trust.