It was a dawn raid tailor-made for the social media age. When the Swiss authorities descended on a five-star hotel on the shores of Lake Zurich to arrest officials from FIFA on corruption charges back in 2015, the resulting images shared around the world inflicted reputational damage that football’s world governing body has struggled to shake off ever since.
While few criminal or regulatory swoops involve executives being bundled into cars under bed linen and the glare of the waiting media, the risk of dawn raids – otherwise known as “unannounced inspections” where, for instance, competition or fraud authorities descend on companies en masse, sometimes across multiple territories simultaneously – are a fact of business life today.
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