Thomas Vellacott, appointed CEO of WWF Switzerland effective May 2012 (photo, ©2012 Buettner / WWF)
BERN, SWITZERLAND – WWF Switzerland will have Thomas Vellacott, 41, as its chief executive officer in mid-May 2012, when Hans-Peter Fricker retires. Vellacott won out over nearly 300 candidates for the job as head of one of Switzerland’s most active and influential environmental organizations.
He joined WWF in 2003 and has been in charge of its Programmes unit, with responsibility for its national and international programmes, which focus on global warming, preserving biodiversity and sound management of resources.
Vellacott is a native of St Gallen, has no political party and he has a mix of corporate and non-profit experience.
He studied Arabic philology and international relations at Durham University in Britain, in Cairo, Egypt and at Cambridge University. After obtaining a master’s degree he worked for the private banking unit of Citibank then as a consultant for McKinsey in Zurich.
BASEL, SWITZERLAND – Adrian Kohler, 53, chief executive of Ricola, the Swiss herbal sweets company, committed suicide Thursday 24 November, the company announced Friday. He sent a message to the executive committee shortly before taking his life, admitting to responsibility for accounting irregularities.
Kohler helped build Ricola's strong reputation for Swiss quality; its six herb gardens in magnificent settings around the country are popular with tourists
He joined the company 25 years ago as an accountant, then became head of finances before taking on the role of CEO in 2004.
German-language media reports are contradictory about the nature of the irregularities at the business owned by the Richterich family. Felix Richterich, board chairman, will take over the CEO duties.
Ricola’s annual turnover is CHF300,000 according to Bild.
The company told employees, who were sent home Friday, that they had lost “a popular supervisor, who was also a good colleague and a loyal friend.”
The company, in Laufen, near Basel, is one of Switzerland’s most highly regarded, often cited among the top 20 most popular brands. Its famous herb gardens in six areas around the country and linked to hiking trails, are open to the public.
Interview with Kohler at the Swiss Economic Forum in Thun in 2006, by swissinfo (Fr), about the company’s success
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The Hug university hospitals in Geneva late Friday pleaded for everyone involved in its lab workers strike to get the situation back to normal, in the wake of the cantonal council’s announcement Thursday that it will not intervene. At issue: work conditions but also a review of the division of labour. The Conseil d’Etat said Thursday it will not review the issues outside the framework of its Scope project, at the end of 2012. The hospital argue that it does not have the authority to review demarcation disputes over who carries out what tasks. It is taking a number of steps, however, to improve work conditions, it said in a statement released late Friday.
Novartis, near Nyon, had a surprise visit Friday from American boss Joe Jimenez, who talked to employees about efforts to keep the site open. The company announced in October that it is cutting 1,100 staff in Switzerland, including 350 at the Prangins site near Nyon, which would be closed as part of the restructuring measures.
Workers held a one-day strike Wednesday 16 November.
Jimenez Friday told the staff that his wish is to keep the site open, and he is personally involved in efforts to do so. ” He told employees that he intended to visit Prangins and would have done so earlier but for an ultimatic from the Unia union demanding that he come: “I don’t reply to ultimatums,” Jimenez is reported to have said.
“A constructive dialogue with Vaud authorities and the federal government is underway,” Jimenez said in Prangins. “Nevertheless, I would like to point out that Novartis is facing a tough future and that new cost cutting measures are needed if the company is going to maintain its strong investment in R&D.”
The first in a series of scheduled meetings takes place 21 November to seek a solution. It involves a high-level task force involving the company, its employees, the union and government authorities.
Sergio Ermotti, new UBS Group chief executive
ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – UBS will have a new boss: Sergio Ermotti, 51, who has been the ad interim chief executive of Switzerland’s largest bank since 24 September, has been named to the post permanently, the bank announced Tuesday morning 15 November.
He replaced Oswald Gruebel, called in to turn the bank around in February 2009, who resigned in September following the discovery of the CHF2 billion loss at the hands of a rogue trader in London.
Kaspar Villiger, chairman of the board, has moved his retirement date up to 3 May 2012, at the bank’s next general assembly. Axel Weber, who was slated to be proposed as vice-chairman and to eventually step into the chairman’s role, is now being proposed to the assembly as chairman.
The bank’s board also confirmed its strategy, it announced, and details of this will be provided at a 17 November financial meeting.
Credit Suisse, which has been told by the Swiss government to hand over data on a number of American account holders suspected of fraud or major tax evasion in the US, received bad news from Moody’s, which has scheduled its credit rating for review, saying the bank’s recent profitability trends and restructuring process should be looked at:
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, died Wednesday, age 56. The news was announced by Apple in a brief tribute on the company’s home page: “Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius and the world has lost an amazing human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.”
Jobs died of a rare form of pancreatic cancer. He had been ill for months and in August he resigned as CEO of the company he started with Steve Wozniak in 1976. His up-and-down relationship with the company he founded turned around in 1997 when he re-joined the company after 12 years away, and turned it into one of the most valuable companies in US business.
Tributes to Jobs, the man who turned Apple into the world’s largest technology company, are appearing in media around the world, but the most overwhelming public praise has come from China, where more than 35 million tributes were posted online in just hours early Thursday.
Links to other sites: Economic Times, India, Gizmodo Australia, Hindustan Times, PC World, Reuters Canada, the Wirecutter (on Gizmodo’s theft of iPhone 4 and relationship with Jobs), Xinhuanet
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Carol Bartz, the woman who promised to turn around Yahoo after replacing founder Jerry Yang as CEO in 2008, has been fired, apparently for failing to live up to that promise. Bartz sent an e-mail to all employees, via her iPhone, saying she had just been told over the phone by Chairman Roy Bostock that she was fired. The company later issued a news release confirming the information, with Bostock thanking her “for her service to Yahoo during a critical time of transition in the company’s history, and against a very challenging macro-economic backdrop.”
The company’s shares rose on the news.
Links to other sites: BBC, Beacon Equity Stock Market Watch, Bloomberg, Wired
Flying in still-troubled skies
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Tony Tyler, former chief executive of Cathay Pacific, will succeed Giovanni Bisignani as Iata’s (International Air Transport Association) director general and CEO, effective 1 July 2011, the organization’s member companies voted 7 June.
Tyler steps into a job that won’t get any easier this year, with Iata also announcing this week that it is sharply cutting its forecast for airline profits for 2011 to $4 billion, a 54 percent fall compared with the $8.6 billion profit forecast in March.
Tom Tyler, Iata's new CEO
Giovanni Bisigniani, outgoing head of Iata
It will be a 78 percent drop compared with the $18 billion net profit (revised from $16 billion) recorded in 2010, Iata noted in a statement Monday. “On expected revenues of $598 billion, a $4 billion profit equates to a 0.7% margin.”
Natural disasters, oil prices, unrest creating “unprecedented shocks”
Bisignani handed out the glum assessment. “Natural disasters in Japan, unrest in the Middle East and North Africa, plus the sharp rise in oil prices have slashed industry profit expectations to $4 billion this year. That we are making any money at all in a year with this combination of unprecedented shocks is a result of a very fragile balance. The efficiency gains of the last decade and the strengthening global economic environment are balancing the high price of fuel. But with a dismal 0.7 percent margin, there is little buffer left against further shocks,” the outgoing director says.
Airline profit factors not the same as in 2008
The gloomy picture is not, however, a repeat of 2008, when the global economic crisis caused major problems for the airlines. A number of factors have changed significantly.
- Fuel is again a factor but the price spike, with an expected high of $115 a barrel this year, is different. Oil inventories are low, but there is ” substantial spare OPEC and refinery capacity, which was not the case three years ago. Second, the monetary expansion that fuelled a surge in financial investments in commodities is ending, which will remove a major upward pressure on fuel prices.”
- Passenger and cargo demand are both on the rise, thanks to higher GDP (gross domestic product), both the increases are smaller than earlier projected, and the “price-sensitive leisure” travellers market fell by 3-4 percent in the first five months of the year as fuel prices rose
- Passenger load factors were “hovering around 77 percent” by April, “more than a full percentage point below the 78.4 percent achieved for international traffic in 2010″, with capacity growing (5.8 percent) faster than demand (4.7 percent)
- Global economic growth is the key risk factor: “High energy prices will certainly have a slowing impact on economic growth. However, the impact will be mitigated by two factors. First, while high oil prices previously triggered recessions, today’s economies (which generate a unit of GDP using just half the energy required in the mid-1970s) are less sensitive. Second, the corporate sector is cash-rich, business confidence is high, and world trade continues to expand at around 9 percent annually. The International Monetary Fund and others have raised global growth projections, which would indicate a recovery in demand growth to the historical 5.6 percent level for the second half of 2011. IATA’s forecast for continued, albeit lower, airline profits despite $110 a barrel oil prices, is dependant on a strong economy to generate sufficient revenues to partially offset higher fuel costs.
Jim Lacey, a former National Irish Bank (NIB) director, has been disqualified for “gross negligence” and “various breaches of duty”, with a high court judge finding that “his conduct made him unfit to be concerned in the management of a company”. The ruling followed an investigation of 10 years of the bank’s activities, with the inspectors concluding in 2004 that the bank was involved in widespread tax evasion. Lacey’s tenure as chief executive and director ran from 1988 to 1994 and the ruling comes 17 years after the event.
Lacey had argued that being disqualified would have major consequences for him; the Irish Times notes that “since leaving NIB, he was appointed to various State boards, including the Dublin Docklands Development Authority, worked with the World Bank and was a director of two International Financial Service Centre companies.”
The judge’s lengthy report came down hard on Lacey for at best being unaware of certain practices at the bank which, as CEO, were his responsibility. “While noting Mr Lacey had said he was unaware of various improper practices within the bank, the judge described as ‘bordering on incredulity’ Mr Lacey’s insistence he did not know what a senior NIB official meant in 1989 when describing non-resident accounts as ‘a sensitive issue’ and referring to ‘this thorny subject’ of Revenue concerns,” according to the Irish Times. “Mr Lacey should have been aware – and in some cases was aware – of a practice of treating certain accounts as non-resident accounts when they were not, the judge said. Mr Lacey ought to have known that practice facilitated the evasion of Dirt by the bank.”
Dirt is the acronym for Deposit Interest Retention Tax.
RTE, Irish broadcast company, notes that the length of the disqualification period will be set in May.
The chief executive, David Wei, and chief operating officer, Li Xuhui (Elvis Lee), of Alibaba, China’s giant e-commerce company, have resigned after more than 1,100 of their suppliers, about 1 percent, were found to have cheated online buyers, Xinhua reports. The problem was uncovered for sales in 2009 and 2010 and founder Jack Ma, one of China’s best-known business figures, told employees in a letter that ““Integrity is the foundation of values that Alibaba cherishes most, which include the integrity of the staff and a honest and safe online trading platform.”
Links to other sites: Reuters, Shanghai Daily
Easyjet and the Saleve near Geneva
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Easyjet, which easily leads the pack at Geneva’s Cointrin Airport, where it has 36 percent of the traffic, saw the number of its passengers flying of out Switzerland rise by 13.7 percent in 2010.
The company had 4.3m departures from Geneva and 1.9m from Basel, where it accounts for 45 percent of the airport’s traffic.
Numbers were up despite numerous delays, some but not all of which were due to natural disasters such as heavy snow and volcanic ash.
Baboo to continue operating until 2011 consolidation; 52 employees reportedly laid off
The Baboo brand will be retained for some products, says new owner Darwin
Geneva and Lugano, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Darwin, Swiss regional airline based in Ticino, is buying out Baboo, in a bid to strengthen its position. It expects to double its balance sheet from CHF40 to 80 million, with more than half a million passengers a year. The company will continue to fly Baboo’s network and will retain the name Baboo for some of its products. The deal, for an undisclosed sum, will be completed in early 2011.
The enlarged Darwin airline will have more than 20 destinations, mainly in Switzerland, Italy and France, and to some extent other European countries.
Chairman apologizes for role in helping some US clients evade taxes, says bankers’ pay will eventually come down
Basel, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - “Are we to blame ourselves, because we believed the board and accepted their proposals?” asked a Mr Gerber, from a group of shareholders that calls itself the Association of Persons Injured by UBS, at the annual general meeting of the bank, taking place Wednesday 14 April in Basel. “There’s only one thing that is sure, that nothing in the bank was safe . . . and certainly I cannot be blamed for that.” The group has called for a social fund to be created to reimburse shareholders who lost money, a call quickly rejected by Kaspar Villiger, chairman of the board.
Rudolf Meyer, Association for Responsible and Sustainable Economic Management (Actares), followed Meyer with harsh criticism of pay packages and pointed remarks about the lost faith of the Swiss public in the bank. He recommended that shareholders not approve two contentious agenda items: the remuneration package and a move to absolve former directors of responsibility for the bank’s 2007-2009 activities.
The two were part of what Geneva newspaper Le Temps describes as an increasingly vocal group of minority shareholders who are changing the nature of the annual meetings, speaking more critically of the decisions and behaviour of the bank’s directors and senior executives.
Chairman Kaspar Villiger opened the meeting with a prepared speech that acknowledged that “we know how much UBS – an institution of which our country was so proud – has disappointed the Swiss people.”
Daniel Vasella, Novartis
Basel, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Daniel Vasella will remain as chairman of the board of Novartis, Basel-based pharmaceutical multinational, but he is stepping down as the multinational’s CEO. The news was announced as Novartis reported an 8 percent increase in profits, $10.3 billion, and turnover of $46 billion for 2009.
Vasella has led the company since the group was created by the merger in 1996 of Ciba and Sandoz.
Basel, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The CEO of Geothermal Explorers, the company that was drilling as part of a Basel geothermal energy project called Deep Heat, has been cleared of wrongdoing by a court in the city. Charges were brought against Markus Haering after the company’s drilling appeared to provoke earthquakes in Basel in 2006 and early 2007.
The Bank of America will pay the US government $45 billion, the money loaned to it under the Tarp bailout plan. The surprise announcement Wednesday 2 December provides some relief for the federal government, which has been criticized for using taxpayers’ money to keep banks alive, only to see them turn around and pay large bonuses as they return to profitability. Bank of America is looking for a new CEO, and observers say paying back the loan will allow it to offer a better pay package, with less government pressure, but it also makes the bank more vulnerable to risk.
Etas project in Zimbabwe: the Roger Federer Foundation is spending some CHF80,000 a year on the project to improve the infrastructure of 8 schools, as well as investing in teacher training and the quality of education for about 2,000 children in the Matopo region.
Basel and Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Roger Federer has signed a 10-year contract with Swiss bank Credit Suisse, for an undisclosed sum, the bank announced Monday 16 November. Federer, on his web site, notes that “As part of the partnership agreement, Credit Suisse will make a significant annual contribution to the Roger Federer Foundation, which is dedicated to helping disadvantaged children and to promoting education, sports and play, particularly in Africa.” The foundation was inspired by Federer’s South African mother and currently states on its web site that its capital is CHF4 million.
The bank’s CEO, Brady Dougan, did not stint in his enthusiastic praise of the Swiss tennis star:
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Swiss industrial group Oerlikon AG announced a drop in sales in the first half of 2009 of 40 percent to CHF1.4 billion, and negative earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) of -CHF164 million. The company announced 25 August that its CEO, Uwe Krueger, is stepping down effective immediately and said board member Hans Ziegler will take over until a new CEO can be named.
The company cut 1,500 jobs in the first half of 2009, reduced hours for 2,300 workers, and announced restructuring costs of CHF130m for all of 2009. Oerlikon announced 25 August that it will cut an additional 2,500 jobs.
Related: TSR (Fre)
McDonalds CEO Martin Knoll
Crissier, Vaud, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Martin Knoll, 51, CEO of McDonald’s Switzerland since 2003, died Friday 21 August in an accident while riding his mountain bike near Engstlenalp, canton Bern, the Crissier, canton Vaud-based company announced.
An Austrian, Knoll joined the company as marketing director for McDonald’s in Austria in 1993. He was was named CEO of the Austrian company in 1997, then vice-president of marketing for 18 countries in Europe and Central Asia, before taking charge of the more than 140 McDonald’s restaurants in Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
He is survived by his wife and two children.
Steve Jobs of Apple was polite but firm: the time had come for Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, to leave the Apple board of directors because Google’s encroachment of Apple territory had reached the point where Schmidt would have to step out of too many meetings because of a potential conflict of interest. Wired
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Bloomberg reports, based on internal sources who are not identified, that Switzerland’s largest insurer, Zurich Financial Services, is looking at four internal candidates to replace James Schiro as chief executive officer. Schiro retires at the end of 2009 after seven years at the helm. He is widely credited with turning the company’s fortunes around and leading share prices higher: the price has doubled since 2001.
Dermot Mannion has resigned, effective immediately, as CEO of Aer Lingus, to make way for “fresh thinking and fresh ideas” in a difficult market. The company has lost 65 percent of its value in the past year and has been struggling to fend off low-cost carrier Ryan Air, which has offered to buy it. CNN
Boris Collardi, Bank Julius Baer
Zurich, Switzerland (Le Temps, Fre) – The new CEO of Bank Julius Baer, Switzerland’s second largest wealth management bank with CHF338 billion under management, is from Nyon: Boris Collardi, age 34. He finished school in Nyon, began his banking career in Geneva at Credit Suisse and studied at IMD in Lausanne.
The CEO of Peugeot in Paris, France has been replaced, and the head of General Motors in the US is on his way out the door, as troubled carmakers in Europea and the US seek a new way forward. The Obama administration has told Rick Wagoner of GM that he must leave and Chrysler that it must form a partnership with Italian carmaker Fiat, in what the New York Times says is a “a level of government involvement in business perhaps not seen since the Great Depression.” In France, Philippe Varin of steelmaker Corus is replacing Christian Streiff as CEO of PSA, reports Le Monde (Fre).
