Certain conditions have to be met for bankruptcy to be possible.
1. Creditors' claims have to be sent through the
Betreibungsamt, and there have to be records of recovering payment attempts.
2. The firm must have no assets to satisfy the claims of the creditors (that you know of).
Here is what this process looks like.
Your creditor does not get paid for goods or services during the agreed period and sends a recovering payment claim to the Betreibungsamt.
Betreibungsamt sends an executor to your firm who takes inventory and sells your assets by
Debt Collection Procedures to repay the creditors. Sometimes the police are involved in this process as well (if the office is inaccessible or they need to search the house of the firm management etc.)
If within 30 days the creditors are not repaid, they are notified about the inability of repayment and the bankruptcy process is initiated by a different authority — the Konkursamt.
The Konkursamt has more authority: it can take your funds from a bank account, search for the creditors, and interrogate the firm's management (and as you know, the management of your Swiss firm must comprise of locals according to the Obligationenrecht).
Then one day, an employee of the Konkursamt summons your director or management of the firm for interrogation. Nonappearance means police involvement.
During the interrogation, they ask questions about the financial state of the legal entity, assets in Switzerland and abroad, cash flow and accounting data and so on.
An interrogation protocol is signed, and a warning is issued about criminal responsibility for lying or hiding facts.
We strongly recommend involving a lawyer when starting the bankruptcy process. It will end up costing you more if you don't hire one.
Within 2-4 months after the interrogation, the frozen assets are confiscated, a bankruptcy estate is created and then distributed among the creditors (in the order of precedence).
At the end of the procedure (which usually lasts at least two years), the company is deleted from the trade registry by the decision of a cantonal court.