Note to GenevaLunch visitors: GenevaLunch is taking the afternoon off to spend it with the Swiss Army. We’ll be back soon with some great stories and more news. Our EVENTS page is updated, see what is on this weekend, and the rest of November, around Lake Geneva. It includes events in neighbouring France, Vaud and Geneva.
GenevaLunch will be bringing you news only sporadically today, 29 October, with our apologies. We hope it’s a slow news day!
Jonction area in Geneva, photo Abraham Del Poso
Geneva, Switzerland (Tribune de Geneve, Fre) - The Jonction area in Geneva was the scene of a large fire Monday night when a hangar in the old Artamis industrial zone, which has most recently been home to an alternative culture centre, caught fire.
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Swisstopo, the government map service, has published five new ski touring maps and will publish another three by the end of 2008.
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Switzerland is making a bid for one of 12 seats available next year on Unesco’s World Heritage Committee, the group that is responsible for the World Heritage sites programme.
Switzerland (TSR, Fre) - The Swiss ski competition season was off to a good start this weekend, with top medals that should please Urs Lehmann, new president of Swiss-Ski, the national ski organization that oversees competitive skiing but also lessons and events for the public.
Andy Sundberg of American Citizens Abroad, left, and Jerry Hagstrom, political commentator, right, with Albert Gallatin on the wall between them, at the Swiss Press Club in Geneva. Gallatin, from a Swiss family, was appointed US Treasury Secretary by President Thomas Jefferson in 1801. He fought for greater accountability of the Treasury to Congress.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Observers and voters outside the United States are missing a crucial part of the US presidential election process despite heavy media coverage: they are not exposed to the political television ads that sway Americans. Jerry Hagstrom, a noted commentator on US politics, told a group in Geneva this week that the ads “show how dangerous it is in American politics to say anything - between the media and Google, anything you’ve ever said can be found” and come back to haunt.
He played several advertisements for the Swiss Press Club and guests of the US Mission in Geneva, one showing how socially conservative Mitt Romney was pushed out of the Republican race after ads made it clear that he had earlier been a social liberal, supporting, for example, gay rights.
Lausanne, Switzerland (l’Hebdo, Fre) - L’Hebdo news magazine this week carries an analysis of the financial crisis and how it is affecting Switzerland: the political world, long “lethargic,” is slowly waking up to a ticking time-bomb.
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Official figures were released Friday morning for Swiss health insurance premiums in 2009, and the Lake Geneva region has been spared the increases that are as high as 5% in much of central Switzerland.
Bern, Switzerland (Le Temps, Fre) - Swiss citizens are likely to go to the polls in February to vote on the free movement of people being extended to Romania and Bulgaira, as well as on whether or not to accept the new biometric passports.
Basel, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Two of the four new members of the UBS 12-member board are Americans: William Parrett, former CEO of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu and Sally Bott, Group human resources director at BP (British Petroleum).
EPFL will open its avant-garde Rolex Learning Center to the public Sunday, to give people a first closeup look at the building, which is scheduled for completion in 2009.
Bern, Switzerland (TSR, Fre) - The Swiss have been increasing their consumption of fresh vegetables and in 2007 they ate a record 75 kg per person, with carrots (8.94 kg per person) heading the list, followed by tomatoes, with 8.48 kg. Lightweight iceberg lettuce comes in third, with a mere 3.93kg per person. Source: Swiss truck gardening centre.
Lausanne, Switzerland (Le Temps, Fre) - Pascal Broulis, president of the Vaud cantonal council, met the local press Thursday to talk about his agenda post-summer holidays, and at the top of the list is the cantonal fine arts museum. The new lakefront Musée des beaux-arts project has come under intense pressure from citizen groups that do not want to see it move from the city centre, but Broulis, who has said in the past he didn’t care for the design, insists that the project must go ahead and that it will play a key role in securing Lausanne’s role as the centre of an increasingly dynamic Lake Geneva area.
Broulis also noted that lowering taxes while safeguarding the canton’s ability to be economically active is a priority for him. He is also the finance minister and he pointed out the very healthy state of the canton’s finances.
Switzerland (Le Temps, Fre) - The Young Greens Monday registered with the federal Chancellory their 150,000 signatures for a vote on environmentally acceptable cars. Once the government verifies the signatures the proposal will be added to a federal popular referendum ballot, the date of which will be determined later.
The ballot item in fact covers far more than just 4×4 gas guzzlers, with 13% of the cars driven in Switzerland targeted, including some family cars, vans and sports cars. And not all SUVs are targeted. Diesel cars would need fine particle filters. For the rest, there are four main criteria for vehicles to be allowed on the roads under the proposal: they must not exceed 2.2 tons (empty), no dangerous frontal parts, emit less than 250 grams of CO2 per kilometre, which corresponds to about 11 litres of petrol for 100 km.
The popular referendum item has the backing of several groups, including the WWF and Pro Velo, but there are strong reservations from others, including the TCS (Touring Club Suisse) and auto import groups.
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The New York Times/IHT today are both running a major story on the Swiss Tinner family of engineers and their CIA connections, focusing on the dismay in Europe over files destroyed by the Swiss government, in connection with the case. The story is a long and complicated saga of spying and black market dealings in nuclear power that centres around the current legal investigation in Switzerland of Friedrich Tinner and his two sons Urs and Marco, who are suspected of having too-close ties to Pakistan’s Abdul Qadeer Khan, described by the New York Times as the country’s "bomb pioneer turned nuclear black marketeer." They were arrested in 2006 and the father was later released but the two sons are still in prison pending the investigation - but no charges have been pressed. The thrust of the New York Times story is that they were in the pay of the CIA and that Switzerland, under pressure from the US government, not only destroyed the files but could well free the brothers.
Swiss President Pascal Couchepin announced in May that the Swiss government had indeed destroyed files related to the case, confirming rumours to that effect. One sources of the rumours appears to have been the Swiss judged assigned to investigate the case. Couchepin gave as a rationale that it was important the files never fall into the hands of terrorists. But, according to the newspaper’s team, which has continued to interview European diplomats and nuclear experts since May, there are strong fears throughout Europe that the CIA is covering its tracks and Switzerland has been too quick to help.
- Background blog post at ArmsControlWonk (Jeffrey Lewis, director of the Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative at the New America Foundation: personal blog)
- "Did Switzerland give in to US pressure?" 30 May 2008, swissinfo
- "Cabinet comes under fire over shredded documents," 3 June 2008, swissinfo, featuring the reaction of Dick Marty, best known for his uncovering of the CIA secret "rendition" flights over Europe
- Related story, WRS radio interview with Doug Frantz, author of The Nuclear Jihadist, a book about the Tinners, May 2008
Morges, Vaud, Switzerland (24 Heures, Fre) - State schools in the Lake Geneva region will open next week with bad news for sweet-tooth students: soft drinks have been banned from the machines for the most part, and the traditional croissants, pains au chocolat and sugar-glazed raisin rolls won’t be on offer during breaks.
Photo: left, acceptable at school and right, banned in Morges and some other Vaud schools.
Bakers in the area who supply schools are being given lists of banned items which include many of the traditional sweet breads and tarts such as the Vaud specialty, salées au sucre, but white bread rolls and chocolate bars will remain on offer.
The new snack options are part of an aggressive programme gradually being put into place by school districts, who are working closely with the canton’s school health services to increase awareness among children, young people and their parents, of the problems linked to excess weight. The programme is part of a larger canton-wide prevention programme. According to the most recent Swiss government figures, 25% of Swiss children are overweight.
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Switzerland’s two largest banks are back in the news with payouts for some of the mistakes they’ve made in recent months. Credit Suisse Wednesday morning announced that it has agreed to pay a fine of £5.6 million after reaching a settlement with Britain’s Financial Services Authority (UK FSA), in relation to the mispricing of asset-backed securities. The bank had announced the mispricing in February 2008 and a month later, the results of an internal investigation.
Last Friday, 8 August, UBS announced that it had reached a comprehensive settlement with several state regulatory bodies in the United States, in principle, to pay back all investors holding auction rate securities, at a cost of $900 million. The auction rate securities investigations began at about the same time as a guilty plea related to tax evasion was lodged in Florida by former UBS wealth manager Bradley Birkenfeld, the two legal tangles frrequently pushing the bank into US and UK business headlines from March to July.
In the case of UBS, its woes with the IRS and bank regulators in the United States have put it back in the news today, with the Financial Times running a headline story, "UBS chiefs knew of rules breaches." The story is about a letter seen by the FT, dated May 2006, from UBS now-chairman Peter Kurer, who was at that point the bank’s general counsel. It was written to Birkenfeld, an employee at the time, and reportedly acknowledges that a whistleblower’s information was leading to a change in procedures - but the bank points out that this has nothing to do with the tax evasion charges against Birkenfeld.
Lausanne, Switzerland (romandie/ats and 20 Minutes/ats, Fre) - Marc Roger, former French football trainer and former boss of the Servette FC in Geneva, will remain in prison until his trial in early September. The Swiss high court has rejected for the third time his appeal to be freed on bond, saying that the risk he will leave the country is too high. Roger is charged on several financial counts, including fraud.
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Shares in Switzerland’s largest bank, UBS, fell Friday on news that the attorney general of New York, Andrew Cuomo, has filed a civil suit against the bank, accusing it of falsely selling auction-rate securities as safe investments in order to reduce its own exposure in a market that was starting to collapse in February 2008. By March the bank was lowering the value of the securities.
UBS, which in June 2008 was the target of the state of Massachussetts for the same reason, and which is threatened by Texas, vehemently denied the charges. The bank responded by stating that "it is frustrating that the New York attorney general has filed this
complaint while we have been fully engaged in good faith negotiations
with his office to bring liquidity to our clients holding auction rate
securities."
The $330bn auction-rate securities market is under investigation by over a dozen regulators, according to the Financial Times, with UBS and another 18 or more companies targeted in New York alone. The bank said 15 July that it would buy back $3.5 billion auction rate shares in Massachussetts.
Bern, Switzerland (TSR, Fre) - The top Swiss army officer, Roland Nef, Friday handed in his resignation to Federal Council Samuel Schmid and the rest of the Swiss Federal Council, or cabinet. Nef was suspended Monday for a month, pending an investigation and a decision by the council on his personal trustworthiness (see GenevaLunch, 21 July). He was asked to show that the charges against him were false. Nef in his resignation acknowledged that he had made mistakes when he parted company with his former companion, according to TSR, but at the time of his appointment, after the split with her, he was unaware this might become public.
Zurich-based SonntagsZeitung 20 July published extracts of the municipal police record from 2006 where the Nef’s former companion accused him of using her e-mail address in responding to sex-related classified ads online and including her photo, fixed and cell phone numbers and her private address. She later dropped the charges and the couple reached a private settlement.
Lake parade 2008
Originally uploaded by mézyg
Geneva, Switzerland, courtesy of mézyg
Lake parade 2008
Originally uploaded by mézyg
Geneva, Switzerland
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Credit Suisse is opening a private banking office in Japan later this year, with Junya Tani heading the operation, which is aimed at wealthy individuals. Tani has been head of wealth management for UBS Securities in Japan and he formerly worked with Citigroup. Credit Suisse adds the private banking business to its active investment banking operation in Japan.
Montreux, Vaud, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Leonard Cohen, one of the biggest names in songwriting for nearly 40 years, whose lyrics have been sung by innumerable major artists, left no doubts about his stature when he played in Montreux 8 July, Tuesday night.
This is a leg on his first concert tour in 15 years, and the crowds loved the quiet Canadian poet with the familiar voice, dressed in black.
Tonight’s big calling card in Montreux is another legend, Paul Simon.
Cohen, meanwhile, moves on to London for a 17 July concert.
(click on images to view larger)
