BERN, SWITZERLAND – Swiss hotels could be exempt from paying value-added tax in 2012-13 to help them fight business lost because of the high Swiss franc, if a lower house committee vote is duplicated in the upper house.
The finance and economy commission voted 13-12 Tuesday 10 January to make one exception to its refusal to review measures to help fight the over-valued franc, in agreeing to give the hotel industry a year’s grace starting in April 2012.
BERN, SWITZERLAND – A new federal commission to encourage and develop electronic voting throughout Switzerland has met for the first time. Four federal officials and eight from cantons will oversee the gradual expansion of electronic voting. Cantons Geneva, Neuchatel and Zurich began developing their own electronic systems in 2004 and there are now 13 cantons which use electronic voting, but with a variety of systems that will need to be coordinated.
The first federal level votes electronically will take place in October when 22,000 Swiss Abroad will be able to vote in elections to the lower house of parliament. The last cantonal elections, in February 2011, saw 177,500 people use electronic votes.
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The outcome of the Swiss-US treaty covering 4,450 UBS bank accounts is unlikely to be decided before Monday or Tuesday, 15-16 June, following a recommendation from a lower house of Parliament commission to reject the treaty or to add a clause to the parliamentary project requiring a popular referendum vote on it. The lower house economic commission, which recommends action to the house as a whole, voted 14-12 Thursday morning against accepting the treaty.
A popular vote, which would take time to organize, would jeopardize the treaty, which requires Switzerland to act on the US request for judicial assistance by completing its review of the 4,450 cases and delivering information on the accounts by the end of August 2010.
Reconciliation committee will get it Wednesday to attempt political parties’ compromise
Swiss parliament in session Photo®Swiss parliament
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The Swiss government’s painstaking efforts to come to a settlement with the US over the handling of 4,450 UBS bank accounts was dealt a serious blow Tuesday 8 June. The lower house of Parliament voted against the Swiss-US treaty 104 to 76, with 16 abstentions. The treaty must now go to a special committee of the two houses, which will try to find grounds for an agreement.
The US in 2009 asked for judicial assistance to obtain data about the accounts and their owners based on suspicions of tax fraud. Swiss banking secrecy laws normally prevent any data about bank accounts from being shared.
The upper house had approved the treaty last week.
Political tug of war
In the lower house the treaty, which covers one specific request for judicial assistance from the US, faced a left-right standoff over stronger control of the country’s two big banks, UBS and Credit Suisse. Socialists tied it to legislation that would limit bankers’ bonuses and a tougher policy on too-big-to-fail banks, moves that were firmly rejected by the right-wing UDC (People’s Party). The UDC is the largest party in the lower house, often a staunch defender of what it sees as Swiss cultural values, one of which is banking secrecy.
The parties of the centre have backed the treaty, saying it is in the national interest of Switzerland to do so, while insisting that it must be a one-time agreement that does not give ground on banking secrecy.
Switzerland’s banking secrecy laws are widely perceived to be linked to the right to privacy in Switzerland.
Year-long deadline to deliver the data looms
The treaty was drawn up in August 2009 and Switzerland has one year to review the bank accounts’ requests from the US and determine if the data should be delivered to the US Treasury Department. But a Swiss high court ruled in February that the federal government could not sign the treaty without consulting Parliament, which meant that the votes in the two houses would take place only in early June.
The parliamentary session ends 18 June and a “reconciliation” committee will meet only 9 June to try to hammer out an agreement that will allow the bill to pass a second vote, ensuring that the final days of the parliamentary session will be fraught with tension.
Links to other sites: Le Temps (Fre), NZZ (Ger), TSR (Fre) in Switzerland; Financial Times and New York Times, Corporate Justice blog discussion
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The finance commission of the Swiss Parliament’s lower house agreed Thursday 21 January to set up a special investigative commission to review decisions made by Swiss authorities concerning UBS. The new commission will review decisions made by the Swiss Federal Council, the Swiss National Bank and Finma, the financial system supervisory body, in three areas: the UBS bailout in the contect of the financial markets crisis, changes to supervisory regulations covering UBS and the decision by Finma for UBS to release client data to US tax authorities.
Doris Leuthard, Swiss president in 2010
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Doris Leuthard becomes president of Switzerland in 2010. The 46-year-old PDC (Christian Democrat) member was elected comfortably (153 of 187 votes) by parliament for the top job, a one-year post that is rotated among the seven cabinet members, the Swiss Federal Council. She is the only member of the council not to have yet held the post. She was in line for the job, as vice-president in 2009, but nevertheless needed the approval of the Federal Assembly, parliament’s two houses. Leuthard becomes the youngest president since 1934.
Leuthard is the third woman to serve as president of Switzerland: Ruth Dreifuss was the first, in 1999 and Micheline Calmy-Rey the second, in 2007.
Japanese prime minister Taro Aso bowed to the inevitable and dissolved the Diet, Japan’s parliament, and called for fresh elections 30 August. His ruling party, the Liberal Democratic Party, LDP, did poorly in local elections earlier this month and the government’s approval ratings have plummeted as Japan has entered its worst recession since the 1990s. A week ago, Aso survived a no-confidence motion in the lower house of parliament, where the LDP has a majority. BBC, CNN
