Legal complaint against PostBus will not be pursued

The Office of the Attorney General’s and the public prosecutor of the Canton of Bern have declared that they do not have the competence to investigate the revelations of illegal subsidies in the ongoing PostBus scandal. The two offices released a joint statement on Wednesday to announce that they would not be taking up the case, one week after the Federal Office of Transport (FOT) filed an official complaint. For one of them to open judicial proceedings, sufficient suspicion of an infraction of the Swiss Criminal Code would have to exist; this is not the case, they said. Rather, the charges invoked in the complaint – manipulating accounts to take advantage of CHF80 million ($85 million) in subsidies between 2007 and 2015 – fall under the system of administrative law. This means that the competent authority to investigate is the relevant federal office; in this case the FOT. Spokeswoman Florence Pictet told the Swiss News Agency that the FOT was currently assessing the ...