Andrej Babiš And His Time In Geneva

(MENAFN- Swissinfo) Billionaire entrepreneur Andrej Babis led his party to victory in the October 2025 parliamentary elections in the Czech Republic. His rise as an agricultural oligarch, backed by opaque Swiss money and connections, enabled his ascent to political power. This content was published on January 8, 2026 - 09:00 11 minutes Christopher Small, Claire-Marie Dikanska

After his party won the most votes in the Czech parliamentary election in October, Andrej Babis – the Slovak-born former prime minister and leader of the populist ANO (Action of Dissatisfied Citizens) party – took to the stage to field questions from the press. The final question of the event came from Radio France, asked in French.

As Babis listened, he began to smile gamely.“Comment ça va?” he teased, before responding in strongly accented French – evidently learned in school, but nevertheless fluent.

The Swiss connection

Babis was schooled not exclusively in Czechoslovakia, but in part in Geneva. While his father served on behalf of the socialist state at the United Nations, in a permanent business mission, Babis was taught for at least a year at the Collège Rousseau, a high school in Geneva.

In a period when most Czechoslovaks had little access to Western Europe, Babis, through his father's connections in Switzerland, fostered his own with many wealthy Swiss citizens. When asked about the origins of his business empire, he would evasively refer to“my Swiss schoolmates”.

In the mid-1980s, the future prime minister's French-speaking abilities helped him win an assignment as the lead representative for Petrimex, the state oil and chemical products importer in Rabat, Morocco. In The Story of an Oligarch (2014), Babis's biographer Tomás Pergler quotes a colleague at the time who noted how crucial, and unusual, it was that Babis behaved“like a Western diplomat”, not a“communist”.

The building of an empire

In 1993, Babis moved to Prague and, supposedly relying on capital contributions from those“Swiss schoolmates” was able to rapidly raise seed funding for a new limited liability company. Established to trade fertilisers only a few weeks after Czechoslovakia broke into two countries – its peaceful“Velvet Divorce” – on January 1 of that year, Agrofert began as a four-man operation and within a few short years had absorbed much of its parent company's base, clients, business, and even top employees.

After Petrimex's representatives later tried to resist Agrofert's expansion by refusing to exercise a pre-emptive right to new shares, Babis turned to an opaque, newly founded Swiss company – O.F.I (Ost Finanz und Investment AG), based in canton Zug – for an investment that gave them a 65% stake in the company. By the time the Petrimex board had caught wind of the transaction, more than two months later, their majority shares had been diluted to 25%.

Despite being based first in Hünenberg and then in Baar, O.F.I. bore no visible sign that employees worked at their small office on the industrial outskirts, shared with twenty other firms, as investigative reporter Jaroslav Spurný of the Czech magazine Respekt, which he co-founded, was to discover in 2002.

“I would talk to Andrej Babis about it several times in private,” the journalist told Swissinfo this month in an interview.“And each time he offered a slightly different version of the role played by O.F.I.”

“That company [O.F.I.] never acted independently,” Pergler told Czech Television reporters in 2017.“It was represented at general meetings by Agrofert's lawyers. So it's more or less obvious that it was only formally a distinct owner [from them].”

The ownership structure of O.F.I. was protected by Article 47 of the Swiss Banking Act, whose provisions criminalise disclosure of financial information without authorisation. This legal framework meant that Swiss authorities, and certainly foreign journalists, had limited means to investigate O.F.I.'s beneficial owners, even in the event of real concerns about its practice.

As such, the owners of the company have never been made public, even as Agrofert has expanded and Babis has accrued political power. O.F.I., which by the end of the nineties held a majority stake in Agrofert, was represented by Libor Siroký, Babis's lawyer and a former counterintelligence officer for the StB, the state security services during the communist era, who died in 2022.

When Spurný searched for a phone number to contact O.F.I., the only one available was listed in Geneva. When the woman who picked up grasped it was a Czech journalist who was asking questions, she promptly hung up.

“To this day, I do not know what role that company played in Agrofert's business,” Spurný told Swissinfo in November. Babis's claim that the owners of O.F.I. were his“Swiss schoolmates” from Geneva has not, for 30 years, been verified.

The 'power broker'

By 2003, Babis used the capital he had at hand to buy up most of the remaining shares in the company, including those from O.F.I. and Ameropa Holding AG, the Swiss agribusiness.

“This was a time when various economic rogues and fraudsters, who largely controlled the [Czech] economy of the 1990s were failing,” Spurný tells Swissinfo.“They were replaced by people like Andrej Babis, and he was the most aggressive and prominent among them – and also the most unscrupulous.”

As Central European countries transitioned to market economies after the end of communism, well-connected business elites took advantage of Swiss banking secrecy, tax havens like Zug, and offshore structures to accumulate, multiply, and conceal their wealth.

“We see the names of other Czech oligarchs who used Switzerland as a safe haven for their financial interests, often illicit,” Pavla Holcová, a Czech journalist for Investigace told Swissinfo. She has herself often been singled out by Babis for attack in the media, particularly after her investigative reporting on his presence in the Pandora Papers of October 2021.

“They find a lawyer who helps them to set up non-transparent business structures, find fiduciary directors, and, in general,” she adds, referring to Czech oligarchs.“They feel protected by proxies and secrecy.”

By 2011, when Babis launched the“civic movement” ANO – an acronym that also means“yes” in Czech – Agrofert dominated the domestic fertiliser and bakery markets, employed around 30,000 citizens, and generated annual revenues of upwards of 120 billion crowns (CHF4.5-4.6 billion, $5.68 billion). In June 2013, Babis acquired MAFRA, the media group that controlled influential newspapers and radio stations, taking advantage of mostly German capital flight from Central Europe.

In politics, Babis proved as shrewd and unrelenting an operator as he had in the world of commercial acquisitions. In parliamentary elections in October of that year, ANO scored 19% of the vote, coming second, and Babis became finance minister. At the next elections in 2017, ANO received nearly 30% and Andrej Babis became Czech prime minister.

The populist-internationalist

This October, Babis led ANO to victory once again after four years out of power, scoring a record 34.5% of the vote, more than 10 percentage points more than their nearest rivals. In early November, he signed a coalition agreement with two nationalist far-right parties. They will take office this week.

The Swiss school system has a long tradition of educating the children of diplomats, international officials and wealthy or controversial expatriates drawn to the country's neutrality and discretion.

The most documented case is Kim Jong-un, the North Korean dictator, who attended school near Bern in the late 1990s under an assumed name, according to former classmates and Swiss reporting.

Geneva's private schools have also been described as destinations for the children of Kremlin-linked elites, including individuals later sanctioned or implicated in corruption cases. In 1999, a Forbes article mentioned that:“The gangsters and corrupt officials who have made huge fortunes from Russia's disintegration flocked (to Switzerland) to place their kids in the right boarding schools”.

Historical research suggests this phenomenon has been going on for more than 50 years. According to historian Christophe Vuilleumier, an ongoing study of postwar Geneva shows that around a dozen children of high-ranking Nazi dignitaries - including, reportedly, a child of Josef Mengele, who conducted medical experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz extermination concentration camp - studied at the University of Geneva in the 1960s.“Mengele himself came to Geneva to visit his son, before returning to Latin America where he lived in hiding,” explains the historian. These enrolments, he notes, appear in the university archives.

These cases show how Swiss schools and universities have acted as discreet meeting points for the children of powerful families, often with limited scrutiny of their backgrounds.

“They know independent media cannot and will not share their views, manipulations, sometimes lies or disinformation,” Spurný, who has himself been the subject of multiple lawsuits from Babis, told Swissinfo, reflecting on the composition of the incoming government.“It will probably be a big battle. But freedom of speech and independent media will still be strong [in the Czech Republic] even in four years.”

“Mr. Babis hates journalists exposing his wrongdoing,” Holcová told Swissinfo.“He has claimed he wants to control the public broadcaster by making its financing dependent on politicians, plans to create a special registry for not-for-profits, and cut any state subsidies to NGOs he deems 'political'.”

As Switzerland negotiates trade agreements with the EU and positions itself as a liberal financial centre, cases like Babis's, tied directly to political power, highlight knotty conflicts about regulatory cooperation and beneficial ownership disclosure that persist.

In late November 2025, President Petr Pavel, a liberal democrat who triumphed over Babis in the last presidential election, insisted that the would-be prime minister had to resolve his conflicts of interest before taking office or ANO would have to propose another candidate for the top job. In a surprise move, Babis stepped away from Agrofert, saying that it would be henceforth governed through a trust.

“I will no longer have anything to do [with Agrofert],” he told supporters in a video message.“I will never own it, I will not have any economic relations with it, and I will not be in any contact with it.” How this will play out, and how other potential conflicts of interest will be resolved, remains to be seen.

Edited by Virginie Mangin/ds

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