Henry Peter

Henry Peter (born in 1957), is a Swiss-French lawyer who specialises in business law and sports law. He is also a professor emeritus of law at the University of Geneva, where he created and headed the multidisciplinary centre dedicated to philanthropy from 2017 to 2024. He is the chairman of the Aventinus Foundation, which owns the French-speaking newspaper of record Le Temps.

Life Henry Peter completed his studies at the University of Geneva, where he obtained a law degree in 1979.

Having received a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation, he began a doctoral thesis and spent a year at the Faculty of Law of the University of California, Berkeley carrying out research from 1983 to 1984.

From 1988 to 2006, he was a partner at Sganzini, Bernasconi, Peter & Gaggini in Lugano.

He specialised in mergers and acquisitions, governance and corporate social responsibility. At the same time, he developed expertise in sports law from 1985, working in the field of Formula One as a lawyer for the Ferrari group. Working in particular with Jean Todt, they negotiated Michael Schumacher's joining the team. During his career, he has also regularly acted as chair, arbitrator or member of arbitration courts in business or sports law disputes. He also takes an interest in the social responsibility of companies and international sports federations, and in 2016 he spoke on the subject of the FIFA corruption case and publicly called for a thorough overhaul of the statutes and culture of the football association.

From 2004 to 2015, he was a member of the Swiss Takeover Board, the Swiss federal authority responsible for the supervision of mergers and acquisitions appointed by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority. In the same field, since 2007 he is also a member and currently vice-president of the Swiss Stock Exchange Sanction Commission and has been a member of the editorial board of Swiss Journal of Business and Financial Market Law.

Henry Peter has also been sitting on the board of directors of several companies, including Swiss Life, Lombard Odier and Italian luxury fashion house Ermenegildo Zegna. He was also Honorary Consul to Sweden for Italian-speaking Switzerland from 1994 to 2010 and as such has been awarded the Royal Order of the Polar Star in 2005.

In parallel to his activities as a business lawyer, he became a professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Geneva after receiving his PhD from there in 1988. He taught corporate law and sports law, while progressively holding several important positions within the institution. From 2006 to 2017, he headed the Business Law Department of the Faculty of Law, and in 2017, he created the Geneva Centre for Philanthropy, serving as its Head until the end of 2024. Shortly after announcing the creation of the Media Philanthropy Initiative, he is appointed chairman of the board of the Aventinus Foundation, which owns the daily newspaper Le Temps. He is also Chairman of the Sports Commission and a member of the Audit Committee of the University, amongst others. , and chairman of the Babel Festival, dedicated to literature and translations.

In the course of his academic career, he has been involved in other institutions, notably the Jean Moulin University Lyon 3 in France, the University of Fribourg, the International Academy of Sport Science and Technology of Lausanne, the Swiss Judicial Academy of Neuchâtel, the Duke Summer Institute, the University of Zurich and the University of Italian Switzerland.

Publications Henry Peter is the author or co-author of more than a hundred publications in his various fields of expertise, including part of the Swiss reference legal commentary Commentaire romand, along with The Routledge Handbook of Taxation and Philanthropy and The International Handbook of Social Enterprise Law, as well as six successive books dedicated to the decisions made regarding the America's Cup.