In 2016, Indian businessman Ranjit Singh Masuta was accused of underpaying and overworking some eastern European employees he had hired at his Subway franchises he owned in the Swiss towns of Dietikon, Langenthal and Interlaken.
While reporting on the investigation at the time, German-language tabloid Blick ran headlines referring to him as the and in two out of a series of articles it had published over a course of 15 days.
Condemning the headlines, Mr Masuta filed a defamation and racial discrimination complaint against the newspaper with Zurich police.
But when the public prosecutor’s office discontinued the criminal investigation, he approached the Zurich Cantonal Court and the Federal Court, both of which rejected his racism plea.
Upholding the lower court’s judgment, the Federal Court ruled that the media reports were based on “serious research” and that the journalists had succeeded in “justifying their allegations,” according to .
However, the country’s apex court found it “problematic” that the publication had associated Mr Masuta’s business practices with his religion which the court acknowledged could cause “resentment” against a certain group in society, but at the same time felt that an average Swiss reader would not mix the two.
Originally from Hoshiarpur district in Punjab, Mr Masuta is a well-known name within the tiny Swiss Sikh community, known for his telecom business and contribution towards building the first gurudwara in Europe made according to the specifications of Sikh architecture.
But of late, he has also become a controversial figure within the community as someone who is often in and out of the courts, defending fraud and money laundering charges.
