Credit Suisse Group AG has reached a coordinated global resolution over its role in the Mozambique “tuna bonds” scandal, agreeing to penalties totalling approximately $475 million across U.S., U.K., and Swiss regulators. The bank’s UK subsidiary pleaded guilty in the Eastern District of New York to a single count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
The settlement breaks down as follows: $247.5 million to the DOJ, $200.6 million to the UK’s FCA, and approximately $100 million to the SEC. Credit Suisse has also agreed to forgive $200 million in Mozambique’s outstanding debt.
The case centres on three loans totalling $1.3 billion that Credit Suisse arranged for Mozambican state-owned companies between 2013 and 2014. The loans were ostensibly for maritime security and a state tuna-fishing fleet — hence the “tuna bonds” label — but were in fact used to line the pockets of Mozambican officials, Privinvest Group executives, and Credit Suisse’s own bankers.
Two Credit Suisse bankers — Andrew Pearse and Surjan Singh — pleaded guilty to receiving tens of millions in kickbacks for arranging the deals. Pearse, the former head of Credit Suisse’s Global Financing Group, admitted receiving approximately $45 million in bribes funnelled through shell companies. Detelina Subeva, another Credit Suisse employee, also pleaded guilty.
On Mozambique’s side, former finance minister Manuel Chang authorised the loans without parliamentary approval, as required by Mozambican law. Chang was arrested in South Africa in 2018 and extradited to the United States; his trial is pending. Jean Boustani, a Privinvest executive, was acquitted by a New York jury in 2019 after arguing that the transactions were legitimate commercial deals.
The loans were structured to be hidden from the IMF, the World Bank, and Mozambique’s own parliament. When the undisclosed debts were revealed in 2016, international donors suspended aid, the Mozambican metical lost a third of its value, and the country defaulted on its sovereign debt. Mozambique remains one of the poorest nations on earth; its citizens are still bearing the economic consequences of loans they never authorised and from which they derived no benefit.
Why tuna bonds matter more than the name suggests
The whimsical name — “tuna bonds” — risks obscuring the severity of what happened here. This is a case in which a major European bank helped a corrupt government borrow $1.3 billion in secret, paid hundreds of millions in bribes to make it happen, and left one of the world’s poorest countries to deal with the consequences.
In my experience working on cross-border financial crime cases, the Mozambique scandal represents the most destructive intersection of banking malpractice and sovereign corruption that I have encountered. The mechanism — disguising unsanctioned sovereign borrowing as commercial project finance — exploited both the opacity of syndicated lending and the trust that international institutions placed in Credit Suisse’s involvement as an arranger.
The IMF and World Bank extended aid and lending facilities to Mozambique on the basis of fiscal information that omitted $1.3 billion in debt. When the hidden loans were discovered, the entire international aid architecture for the country collapsed. The human cost — measured in curtailed health programmes, delayed infrastructure, and increased poverty — is incalculable and ongoing.
What troubles me most from a compliance perspective is how this happened inside Credit Suisse. The bank’s own employees were taking tens of millions in bribes. This is not a failure of transaction monitoring or sanctions screening. This is direct, active participation in a corrupt scheme by senior staff in a front-office role. The compliance function — if it was consulted at all — was either bypassed or unable to challenge revenue-generating bankers.
The $475 million penalty, while significant, represents a fraction of the harm caused. Mozambique lost billions in economic value and its citizens will bear the cost of the hidden debt for a generation. The acquittal of Jean Boustani — the Privinvest executive who arguably profited most — was a reminder that even in clear-cut cases of corruption, criminal convictions are not guaranteed.
For the financial crime community, the tuna bonds should be a cautionary tale about what happens when deal-making incentives overwhelm compliance controls, and when the victims of financial crime are too poor and too far away for anyone to care until it is too late.