The mysterious business and financial dealings of Gen Augusto Pinochet, his son Augusto and his son-in-law, Mr Julio Ponce, are likely to be revealed to the world as the former Chilean dictator faces the increasing prospect of being extradited to Spain.
Gen Pinochet has up to now protected his affairs from public view in Chile. The Socialist Party, a member of the Swiss government coalition, is seeking the seizure of his assets in Switzerland after an official investigation of his arms-dealing and financial activities.
Quoting the flourishing Swiss arms trade with Chile, Mr Jean Ziegler, a leading Socialist deputy from Geneva, last week called for the seizure of what he termed "large private bank accounts in Switzerland belonging to some Chilean generals, notably Augusto Pinochet, at the time the commander-in-chief of the army".
The spokesman for the Swiss Federal Department of Justice and Police said yesterday the government could seize Pinochet assets under the same law which allowed the property in Switzerland of Fernando Marcos, the formed president of the Philippines, and the Duvalier family of Haiti to be embargoed.
Worldwide assets of the Pinochets are believed to include a large share-holding in Soqimich, a Chilean company producing iodine and nitrate fertiliser from workings in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile.
A Chilean businessman, Mr Ponce has served as president of Soqimich. He is married to Gen Pinochet's daughter, Veronica, and is often referred to in Chile as el yerno, the son-in-law.
The Swiss inquiries will turn the spotlight back on to the dealings of Augusto jnr with Swiss suppliers to the Chilean forces. Mowag builds military vehicles and SIG is a company which manufactures light automatic weapons and which has received the former dictator at its headquarters on the Rhine near Schaffhausen.
Augusto jnr has already had brushes with Chilean law over SIG. In 1993 the Council for the Defence of the State, a senior legal body in Santiago, called for an investigation of possible fraud against the state in the case of the sale to the Chilean army in the late 1980s of SIG Valmoval, a Chilean rifle factory affiliated to the Swiss company.
The affair, which became known as the "Pinocheques case", sprang from the council's wish to investigate evidence that Pinochet jnr had received three cheques to the value of 971.9 million pesos (about £2 million), after he apparently acted as middle man, heading a company called PSP which bought SIG Valmoval and sold it on to the army his father was commanding.
A month later the army, under Gen Pinochet's orders, threatened violence and the case was set aside. The next year the general was ordered to testify at the Second Criminal Court in Santiago about the sale of SIG Valmoval, but refused. The investigation was finally called off in June 1995 on the direct instructions of the president, Mr Eduardo Frei.
Chile's relations with Switzerland are already at breaking point, and it has sought to have the former Chilean dictator extradited to face trial in Geneva on charges of the kidnapping and murder of a Swiss boy, Alexei Jacquard.
In September, Switzerland rejected a Chilean demand for the extradition of Mr Patricio Ortiz, an anti-Pinochet activist imprisoned by a military tribunal in 1995 who escaped and fled to Switzerland.