Ferdinand Marcos, Peter Bosshard and I

One of my favorite movies is The Big Lebowski. In this film by the Coen brothers, Jeff “the Dude” Lebowski gets into serious trouble because some mobsters confuse him with a namesake. Little did I suspect that I would one day face namesake troubles of my own.

If you meet a Bosshard, you can be quite sure that his or her family originates in the hills of upstate Zurich, or Züri Oberland as we affectionately call it. We are not a big clan, and I don’t have many namesakes in public life. There is an art collector, an aviation nut, and one or two corporate lawyers (more about whom later).

Until 2001, I was a campaigner and eventually the coordinator for the Berne Declaration, the wonderful Swiss NGO which advocates for international development, environmental and human rights concerns. One of our most prominent campaigns was an effort to return the stolen assets of the deposed dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his cronies from Swiss bank accounts to the Philippines. Based on my research in the Philippines with the Freedom from Debt Coalition, we could show that Swiss banks had given loans for corrupt projects of Marcos cronies such as the infamous Bataan nuclear power plant, and that the bribes from these projects ended up on accounts in Switzerland with the very same banks. A veritable Swiss revolving door! I presented my findings to the Filipino attorney general and the Swiss justice minister, and spoke up at the annual meeting of UBS. The matter got quite a lot of attention.

The Swiss courts eventually ruled against the Marcos clan, and the stolen assets were returned to the Philippines. But not everybody was amused. One day I got a letter from a lawyer who shares my name and was afraid he might be mistaken for an anti-corruption activist. Without joking, my namesake asked me to change my name in public appearances. I was intrigued by the fact that a Swiss lawyer feared that anti-corruption efforts might taint his reputation. But I didn’t pay any attention to the strange request and forgot about it.

Until today. The latest issue of the International Herald Tribune reports that a Swiss court cleared the way for the Philippines to reclaim another $5 million in assets linked to a Marcos crony. The lawyer for the owner of the account bears no less than my name. He announced that he would appeal the decision to the Swiss Supreme Court. But I swear it wasn’t me! It seems the Marcos cronies have the rare privilege of dealing with Peter Bosshards on both sides of the fence.

My Swiss namesake lawyers sure got even with me, and I hope my old friends in the Philippines don’t suspect that I sold them out. I will arm-wrestle over the matter with my namesake when I next visit Switzerland. Or considering the trouble which the Big Lebowski got into, maybe I won’t. Either way, I wish all my namesakes and other readers a happy holiday.

Peter Bosshard is the policy director of International Rivers. He does not practice law in Switzerland. Peter’s blog, Wet, Wild and Wonky, appears at www.internationalrivers.org/en/blog/peter-bosshard