French woman (frontaliere) trafficked to promote unauthorised cross border Swiss insurance
March 08, 2025
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
Today, I published a blog on human trafficking and modern slavery. In effect, all forms of exploitation, combined with a voyage of any kind, can be considered as a possible case of human trafficking, even if the voyage is completed using a regular passenger train or flight.
The victim, a French woman had worked seven years in an insurance company in Lyon.
According to the FINMA judgment, the Swiss jurists who were selling the insurance without authorisation were under surveillance since 2021 or earlier.
At the last minute, before FINMA shut down their scam in 2023, the Swiss jurists had created a new company Justiva SA and they employed the cross-border worker (frontalière) to help them.
The victim had acquired various rights due to seven years of service at her previous employer and all those benefits are foregone if a worker quits to change employer. This is especially true if a worker in France quits their job to take a higher salary in Geneva.
The victim started her new job in Geneva in February 2023 and FINMA closed the insurance company in the first week of April 2023. She was still in her probation period when FINMA belatedly shut down this scam.
The FINMA judgment says the rogue firm was immediately shut at the beginning of April. During the probationary period, the victim would have been entitled to one week's pay in lieu of notice. According to the victim's LinkedIn profile, she continued with the new firm Justiva SA for three months until the end of June 2023. We found details of this woman in a backup copy of the Justiva SA web site, the Justicia SA web site and LinkedIn.
Anybody who wants to work in a Swiss insurance company normally needs to complete a three year apprenticeship or diploma in Switzerland. The selection process is normally highly competitive. This woman clearly did not have the Swiss qualifications. When the Swiss jurists offered her a job promoting legal insurance, without any Swiss qualifications, she must have felt she had won the lottery.
The financial regulator went to great lengths to obfuscate the failure of the insurance company run by Swiss jurists. Did they make any effort to prevent former employees talking about the failure?
The outgoing director of FINMA had previously worked for Zurich Insurance. Miraculously, in the same month that Urban Angehrn departed FINMA for health reasons, the woman was given a job at his former employer.
It feels miraculous that Zurich would spontaneously offer this opportunity to somebody who had not passed through the same Swiss training as other employees.
Promoting an unauthorized insurance for cross border workers appears to simultaneously violate laws in both Switzerland and France. If the woman was tricked to leave a stable job in Lyon and do this illegal work then she has been exploited. As the exploitation occurred over an international border, it is a clear clase of human trafficking.
French legal code Art. 225-4-1:
Human trafficking is the act of recruiting a person, transporting them, hosting them or welcoming them for the purposes of exploitation using any of the means following ...
4. for any transaction or payment or another promise of future remuneration or advantage
The exploitation mentioned in the first point can be any of the following ... or to compel the victim to commit any crime or offence
For the purposes of the French law on human trafficking, creating a situation where a cross-border worker is compelled to sell unauthorised insurance is just as bad as using them for sexual slavery. The loss of their previous employment benefits and the terms of the probationary period have the effect of compelling them to continue working for their new master even if they discover it is a scam.
Did FINMA realize that a French woman was human trafficked in violation of modern slavery laws right under their noses in a firm they had been so slow to shut down? Is that the reason the woman appears to have found a new job so conveniently while the clients got nothing?
When I saw this, I remembered my research into the Catholic abuse scandal and the practices used to make secret pay-offs. â–ˆ
