The $6.3M "Speedmaster Affair": A Prosecutorial Hot Potato?

This may not come as a surprise, but I do not read German-language newspapers on a regular basis.

Dial of a vintage Omega Constellation, pie pan.

I am, however, keenly interested in a scandal involving the Swatch Group and a "Frankenwatch" Speedmaster which was sold at auction a while back for over $3 million. I won't go into all the minute details here, but the punchline is that Swatch Group bought the watch only to discover that some of its own employees may have been part of a conspiracy to assemble a watch which would be quite rare and important if it were authentic. But, apparently, it was not authentic. When the deception was uncovered, various people who were part of the "inside job" lost employment and, reportedly, legal authorities were notified in Switzerland. I originally wrote about this in 2023, you can read my coverage here.

There's been excellent reporting on this matter from many sources (see, for example, this story from Bloomberg). Notable among them is a German-language newspaper: Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ). One thing I've discovered is that it is very challenging to gather information about the Swiss watch industry if you are not "on the ground" in Switzerland. Fortunately, NZZ is interested in the "Speedmaster Affair" and, since they have reporters in Switzerland, they often publish more details than I could ever obtain. Out of curiousity, I checked to see if they had updated their reporting and, sure enough, they have. So what more can we learn (note: I relied on Google Translate to provide an English version of the original text)?

The NZZ article reports that the head of Swatch Group, Nicolas Hayek, is confounded by how authorities have handled his company's complaint. NZZ reports that the public prosecutor's office in Bernese Jura-Seeland has made very limited progress in following up on the scandal. I quote NZZ: "The regional public prosecutor's office, where Omega filed the complaint, tried three times in the past eighteen months to pass the case on to the public prosecutor's office for economic crimes." NZZ further reports that this is a very unusual path for a criminal complaint to take.

The public prosecutor in question made the following observation when asked for an explanation by NZZ: "The longer an investigation takes, the clearer its contours become".

A vintage Omega watch.

Now, I know little about criminal investigations beyond what I've learned from television programs and movies. But I thought it was always best to follow leads before the "trail goes cold." I thought the window to solve a murder was 48 hours long and, after that, cracking the case was much, much harder. And what about that old chestnut "justice delayed is justice denied"?

I digress. NZZ did provide some new information regarding the state of the case. Omega's investigation suggests that 300 watches and watch components were stolen from their warehouse and archives. A grand total of five parties supposedly perpetrated the scandal: three internal to Omega and two outsiders. The total damage to Swatch Group was estimated at $6.3 million. And, even though the case was, in some sense, floundering in the public prosecutor's office, some progress has been made. According to NZZ "release of documents, house searches and the evaluation of seized electronic items" as well as "initial interviews" have all taken place.

The real risk with this kind of delay is that there may be more victims while the wheels of justice slowly grind away. According to NZZ, the two external parties are still exchanging watches with others on the secondary market. And, Swatch Group shareholders worldwide (including the Hayek family) do deserve some financial restitution, if at all possible. One thing is for certain, much of the Speedmaster Affair story is still untold.

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