The bill which had gone to the lower house was an obvious product of the Sani Abacha debacle. Mr Grobet's proposal followed criticism by Switzerland's banking regulator last month of six Swiss banks for failing to take sufficient care in accepting millions of dollars linked to the late Nigerian dictator. The Swiss Federal Banking Commission (SFBC) had said that the six banks' acceptance of money from Abacha and his entourage - whom Nigeria suspects of pillaging the Nigerian central bank and squirreling as much as US$3bn abroad - was "disturbing and damaging." Mr Grobet told the Swiss parliament that banks should no longer be exempt from criminal responsibility if they handled stolen money.

Mr Grobet's proposal met strong opposition from finance minister Kaspar Villiger, who rejected the suggestion that banks were accomplices to money laundering and insisted that current regulations were already enough to deter foreign government officials from stashing stolen money in Switzerland. He added that the naming and shaming of the banks involved in the Abacha case was a strong motivation to banks to act responsibly in the future.