Patrick Odier: 'Switzerland Cannot Hide Behind Neutrality'

Patrick Odier, scion of one of Switzerland's most illustrious banking dynasties, has brought me a chocolate cauldron.

A lot has changed in Swiss banking during Odier's 40-year career at his family firm - including, in the past decade or so, a tumultuous if qualified end to its most celebrated quality, unyielding secrecy - but this gift is not, it turns out, a metaphor for the integrity of Swiss finance.

It is a wintry Friday in Geneva and the snow is falling hard. At the weekend the city will celebrate the Fête de l'Escalade, commemorating a victory over the Catholic duchy of Savoy in 1602. The heroine of the show is an old lady and her stock pot - the defenestration of which, in legend, alerted the city watch to a devious night-time attempt by Charles Emmanuel I's troops to storm the walls. The Genevois gift dinky chocolate cauldrons every second Sunday of advent in remembrance.

“It happened just over there,” Odier tells me shortly after we meet, recounting a miniature history lesson on his home city - a masterclass in introductory charm - as he points across a slush-covered street towards the university.

We're meeting for lunch at Le Philanthrope - a modern French restaurant, which, I teasingly suggest to Odier, he has chosen for its name as a not-so-subtle piece of public relations work. He protests: one of his daughters works as a lawyer across the road, he says, and this is their lunch spot. And besides, the crowd is very agréable: there are, noticeably - Odier points this out himself - very few banker-types in here. Filament bulbs dangling, fashionably, from looping cords and a wallpapered feature wall give it a slightly over-designed air, but the place is packed.

Odier, 67, is slight and spry, wearing a dark grey suit, a white shirt and a light blue gilet.“I've always had to ensure that my words corresponded to my duty . . . but now if I can express myself a little more openly, I will do,” he says, smiling, deftly wielding the conditional caveat.

Switzerland does not have an aristocracy but, if it did, Odier would be towards the top of it. Banking is a national institution and Lombard Odier - founded in 1796, ultra-careful, ultra-discreet, owned and controlled by just six partners - probably comes close to embodying its ideal.

But Odier is also something of a radical in his industry. When Swiss banks' secrecy was finally challenged internationally, Odier says he pushed his peers, as head of the country's powerful banking lobby, to accept change. More recently, he has been one of the financial sector's most vocal figures on climate change and finance. He is a major patron of the arts and of medical philanthropy. And through his wife, the Greek-Egyptian former ballet dancer Cynthia Odier, he is plotting a retirement working on cultural projects in Athens. Not to mention his interest in politics and international diplomacy.

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