François Pilet, Switzerland, is a freelance investigative reporter with a special interest in finance, banks, money laundering and corporate fraud. Together with his partner Marie Maurisse, he launched Gotham City, an independent website specializing in court reporting.
He started out as a beat reporter for the local daily 24 Heures in Lausanne. From 2008 to 2011, he worked as a business reporter with the daily newspaper Le Temps in Geneva, where he covered the rapid succession of historic events that brought the Swiss banking industry to its knees: the subprime mortgage crisis and the UBS bailout in 2009, the U.S. tax fraud investigation against UBS and many other Swiss banks, and the Madoff fraud.
He was part of the network of journalists working on the Wikileaks Cablegate in 2011, editing the release of hundreds of US diplomatic cables. He collaborated on ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks and Swiss Leaks projects.
Pilet co-founded the GVA Dictator Alert project, a Twitterbot tracking aircraft used by authoritarian regimes at the Geneva airport.
He is the co-author of two TV documentaries: "Secret" in 2010 and "Le business du sang" in 2017. He is also the co-author of "Krach Machine" (Calmann Lévy, Paris, 2013), the first book published in French about high-frequency trading.
