Swiss banking secrecy intact with insistance on “no fishing expeditions”
Swiss parliament in session Photo ©Swiss parliament
Swiss parliament in session Photo ©Swiss parliament
Treaty agreements interpretations clearer, says Bern
Bern, Switzerland (GeenvaLunch) – The Swiss Federal Council is asking parliament’s authorization to amend double taxation treaties (DTT) with a number of countries, to more precisely define what is meant by “administrative assistance”. The term covers requests for help, from one government to another, in cases of suspected tax fraud or tax evasion.
The announcement 6 April comes two months after the council agreed that the amendments are necessary because the more precise interpretations were not available when the treaties were signed in June 2010. They will affect treaties with: Denmark, Finland, France, the UK, Qatar, Luxembourg, Mexico, Norway and Austria. A DTT signed with the US will also require an amendment, to be handled separately.
Parliament must be consulted for any changes to the treaties, under Swiss law.
Switzerland has in the past insisted that help could be provided only if a bank account owner was identified, but in February 2011 the ruling Federal Council agreed that an interpretation clause should stipulate that “in future indicating the name and address of the taxpayer and the information holder is no longer absolutely necessary for processing administrative assistance requests, provided that the identification occurs by other means and fishing expeditions are not involved.”
The interpretation clause is necessary, the council argues, to ensure that all states in the treaties have a level playing field and to avoid a “foreseeable obstacle” if Switzerland’s assistance is not deemed to be in line with the treaty because of varying intepretations. The clause will reduce “the risk of failure in the peer review process of the Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes”. the council says in a press release.
Tax assistance only for individual cases: amendments will not change this
The price of buckwheat is soaring in Moscow as crop shortages due to the 2010 summer drought and fires hit supplies. The normal harvest of 1 million tons looks set to drop to 600,000. Prices have already doubled in some stores and a 10 percent increase across the board for retailers looks likely. Buckwheat is a staple in the Russian diet. Russia has suspended grain exports to the end of the year due to the worst drought in more than a century.
Meanwhile, in Denmark, heavy rains have been taking their toll on the wheat crop.
Links to other sites: Forexyard, Moscow Times
Video, 14 August 2010 “very extreme rain” in Copenhagen
Head north, dear diners, and feast on musk ox and roast marrow, at the restaurant that now holds the coveted number one in the world slot, according to Britain’s Restaurant Magazine. Noma in Copenhagen, Denmark, was bumped up to the top rating, beating out Spain’s revered elBulli which has been number one for four years running. Noma’s chef, 32-year-old Rene Redzepi formerly worked at elBulli and his restaurant has been working its way up the list. His cuisine is distinctly Nordic: forget about the olive oil.
In the restaurant’s own words: “What you will find here at noma is not centered so much on olive oil, foie gras, sun-dried tomatoes and Mediterranean black olives. We’ve been busy traveling around in the Nordic regions and we have been finding a number of simply phenomenal ingredients that we have flown into town for our use: Horse mussels, deep-sea crabs and langoustines from the Faeroe Islands, which are living right up until the moment they are served to our visitors. Halibut, wild salmon, cod and seaweed and curds from Iceland. Lamb, musk ox, berries and the purest drinking water from Greenland.”
ElBulli and Britain’s The Fat Duck both slipped a notch to second and third places.
Links to other sites: Irish Times, Restaurant Magazine
Police in Aarhus, Denmark, have shot and wounded a Somali man carrying a knife who broke and entered the home of Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard after the owner hit an alarm bell to call the police. The man, say police, is a member of the radical Islamist al-Shabab militia. Westergaard became a target of Islamist extremists after he published a cartoon in 2005 of the prophet Mohammed with a bomb in his turban, which they considered blasphemous. The cartoon led to a series of incidents involving Danish media and embassies around the world, despite an apology from the newspaper.
Climate Summit © Chappatte, distributed by Globe Cartoon. More cartoons on Chappatte’s web site. Geneva-based Patrick Chappatte works for the International Herald Tribune, for Geneva newspaper Le Temps, and for NZZ am Sonntag. All cartoons reproduced with permission.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The world climate summit opens in Copenhagen, Denmark Monday 7 December, with leaders from 192 nations attending. The goal: to find a global agreement on climate change, especially global warming.
Obama changes Copenhagen visit for greater impact
US President Barack Obama will visit the summit 18 December rather than 9 December as earlier planned, reflecting his desire to be there at what looks like a critical moment, the White House announced 5 December.
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Nineteen countries have now secured their places in the Fifa World Cup finals to be held in South Africa in 2010 after the penultimate games in the qualification series. In the African group Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire are through and six places are up for grabs. Australia, Japan and the two Koreas take the Asian places with one more team entering a playoff with New Zealand. Seven of the 13 European places are decided:
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Switzerland has taken over the top position in the annual rankings by the Geneva-based World Economic Forum (WEF) in its Global Competitiveness Report 2009-2010, leaving the United States in second place for the first time in a number of years. The WEF says the lower spot for the US is due primarily to “weakening in its financial markets and macroeconomic stability.”
Singapore, Sweden and Denmark are the other top five countries, and European countries dominate the top 10, with Japan and Canada as 8 and 9 respectively. The UK has slipped to 13th place.
The report is compiled by combining publicly available data with an opinion survey of executives around the world.
Switzerland receives high praise in several areas:
Gordon Shepherd, WWF international policy and Martin Sommerkorn, WWF Arctic research, at Geneva climate conference
Photo: Marco Tedesco, WWF
Complete coverage of the WCC-3 by GenevaLunch
Conference is 31 August – 4 September 2009
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – One-quarter of the world’s population is likely to be affected by rising ocean levels provoked by melting Arctic ice, a WWF study released 2 September shows. The Arctic is heating up at twice the rate of the rest of the Earth, the new Arctic Climate Feedbacks report shows. As a result, the level of oceans can be expected to rise by one metre by the end of the 21st century, twice as fast as current predictions suggest.
The report pulls together the most recent data covering the Arctic and its impact. It includes the ice sheets of Greenland and West Antarctica in global sea level projections, which were not included in the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 2007 assessment of the Arctic, widely relied on. The addition of these areas appears likely to change temperature and precipitation patterns in Europe and North America, affecting agriculture, forestry and water supplies, the new data shows.
Photo: Marco Tedesco, WWF
The Arctic holds twice as much carbon as the rest of the world and the study indicates that as warming speeds up, carbon released by warmer soils could reach significant levels. Read more…
Lake Geneva
Complete coverage of the WCC-3 by GenevaLunch
Conference is 31 August – 4 September 2009
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Geneva is home this week to a key global conference on how the world can adapt to climate change – disasters such as floods and hurricanes, but also the more subtle changes that affect agriculture, tourism and daily life.
The conference agenda is wide-ranging and includes improvements to early warning systems for disasters and how to provide more precise and more localized weather forecasting, needed by developing countries as well as industries in the developed world.
The meeting is hosted by Switzerland and organized by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and a group of partners.
Hans-Rudolf Merz, Swiss president and finance minister
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Swiss Finance Minister Hans-Rudolf Merz signed a new double-taxation treaty with his French counterpart, Christine Lagarde in Bern 27 August. The new treaty is the thirteenth Switzerland has signed since March, after Luxembourg and Denmark.
It brings Switzerland in line with the OECD standards for administrative assistance in cases of tax fraud, according to the Swiss government. Lagarde said in Bern that banking secrecy can no longer be used by one of the two states to refuse to provide information.
Delighted Swiss mobile phone user
Paris, France (GenevaLunch) – Swiss mobile phone users pay among the lowest rates in the OECD countries, a study released 11 August reports. The Paris-based OECD, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, compares mobile phone service costs among member country markets, using Purchasing power parity (PPP) to compares prices using the cost of a similar basket of goods and services.
China is the world’s third largest economy and now the “world’s top greenhouse gas emitter,” notes Reuters, as Todd Stern, the US official with responsibility for climate change policy, visits Beijing, the latest in a series of meetings designed to move closer to agreement on gas emissions. China is grappling with balancing strong growth and reducing emissions. A Chinese official quoted by Reuters, Gao Guangsheng, says that “bridging disputes on basic principles will probably push talks to the wire” in December in Copenhagen meeting. Ministers from several countries will be meeting then to replace the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. Xinhua
[with UN TV video] Geneva, Switzerland and Bonn, Germany (GenevaLunch) – Eighteen United Nations and non-UN aid agencies 8 June issued a joint statement arguing for “humanitarian impacts” to be included in the new climate change protocol. A December meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark of ministers from around the world will seek to replace the Kyoto Protocol, adopted in 1997. A new agreement must “set out a workable approach to help the world counter the impacts of extreme weather events and environmental degradation on vulnerable communities,” the Inter-Agency Standing Committee argues.
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The authors of the 2009 World Competitiveness Report are the first to say it: “Recessions do not respect calendar years!” Economies remained strong for the first half of 2008, then began their tailspins. As a result, the US remains number one in the annual survey published by IMD business school in Lausanne, there were few changes in the top 10. Singapore moved from second into third place, swapping positions with Hong Kong, and Switzerland remained in fourth place.
Morges tulip festival
Lake Geneva region, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Mother’s day in Switzerland is coming up on Sunday 10 May. Many special activities will be taking place over the weekend that could be ideal for celebrating. The CGN lake boats company offers a special Mother’s day lunchtime cruise on Lake Geneva where mothers are the guests of honour. The final day of the Morges Tulip festival also falls on 10 May.
