Geneva, a city you’ve probably never seen, even if you live there

The pot at the end of the rainbow, for British bankers, might be in Geneva

Some things never change, and a certain class of wealthy Brits seeing quaint little Switzerland as a playground is one of them. Another is the itch of UK newspaper writers to get the editor to pay for a trip, preferably during the ski season, to trot along on the heels of the rich to write about this fabled, gorgeous, expensive, boring little police state where people survive on chocolate and cheese. The Times has just done it and so has the Telegraph.

If you’re determined to see a place as an old cliché, you will, and they did. Clichés work, of course, because they have an element of truth in them. The younger brother of a friend was put under my care for a long 24 hours in Paris when I lived there, and at the end he dismissed the city as boring, with terrible food and ugly people. The women were short and bony, he said, and restaurants didn’t even serve ketchup with their hamburgers which were, by the way, awful, he added.

I couldn’t disagree, but I did think he’d missed something.

So did England’s newspaper writers. Geneva officials might be annoyed with the articles, Times and Telegraph fans will lap it up, and the rest of us will roll our eyes in wonder.

Once a year people in Geneva dress alike, many in gray, it is true (photo: Laila Rodriguez)

When I began to work as a journalist in Switzerland my editor at Business Week, who was based in Paris, admonished me to always include something about cheese with holes, cuckoo clocks or gold under the streets of Zurich. Why, I asked, assuming that my job was to add something new, preferably intelligent to what the world knew about the place. “The editors back home want it. They say that’s what readers like, and they’ll never read the more serious stuff if we don’t give them the clichés first.”

I also worked for Time magazine then, and asked the bureau chief there if he agreed. Absolutely, he said. It helps the editors in New York keep Switzerland and Sweden straight in their minds. Those white, snowy capital S places.

A little cliché-busting

The Times and Telegraph reporters got some of the basics wrong and don’t appear to have entirely understood the Swiss tax system.

Sign out for British bankers?

Here is a summary of the news story, the more or less serious stuff that’s prompted editors to shell out the cash for an EasyJet flight from London, I assume (times are tough in the media world). Hedge funds are moving out of London to Switzerland: 8 of them made the decision in December. British media are increasingly focusing on the story because UK tax rates on bank bonuses and high income levels will go up sharply as of 1 April 2010, and this is prompting some companies to move.

Here are my two bits on the story: Geneva’s Ivan Pictet, president of the board of the Geneva Financial Center, said in October when asked about hedge funds moving in, that Switzerland is and will continue to have only a tiny role to play in the international hedge funds business. He used a figure of maybe up to 2 percent of the global business. Geneva would welcome more companies moving in, but it’s not about to replace The City as a hedge fund capital, he noted.

End of story. But if you want the editor to pay for that trip to the fabled playground you have to have a bit more to write. So here’s what we get: Geneva is boring, expensive, people all dress alike, and communes dictate how you live. Taxi drivers think only about money (well, you probably do recognize that one, but London has a couple of these, too). The place is crazily racist.

Geneva and Switzerland, as viewed by London’s newspapers

From the Times:

• Hedge funds and wealthy people want to take up Swiss residence so they can get a tax forfeit: lump sum taxation (GenevaLunch: Some  confusion here: the rules are clear that this is only for people who “do not pursue an occupation in Switzerland”, which lops out anyone employed by a hedge fund, no matter how much they make. There were, 5,000 people who paid lump sum taxes, less than 0.1 percent of the Swiss population, in 2008)
• “There are hardly any normal shops: most seem to sell only diamonds and furs.” (GL: That’s not called Geneva – it’s called a two-block area)
• “. . .supper at a studenty restaurant where they serve only steak and chips: £150 [CHF220] for three, excluding service (GL: That’s a silly price for what you ate unless it was in a trendy restaurant and included a bottle of wine. The wine is generally better and cheaper than in London – and service is included, by the way)
• A Geneva lawyer says he buys his groceries in France because Switzerland is too expensive (GL: ask him what he buys: some stuff is cheaper in France, other stuff cheaper in Switzerland, and the great thing about Geneva is you can do your shopping in both – toilet paper in Switzerland, steak in France)
• Geneva is boring. (GL: No, it’s small. There’s a difference. I have been to Cardiff three times, a city about the same size as Geneva, and thought it was boring, too – everything shut before 6 in the evening, food was either bad or else it was good but way too expensive. I had the good grace not to write that because I figured there might be more to the place, if I took the time to find out.)
• Communes rule people’s lives with police-state style rules (GL: okay, at this point the writer veers off into fiction, with visits from Interpol and commune rules about flowerbox colours, which is fun, but I’m starting to wonder if she really caught that EasyJet flight or just cobbled together the story over a nice cup of tea in London.)
• CHF40 an hour for cleaning help. (GL: that’s the rate you pay for a cleaning company, not a regular cleaning woman, who gets CHF20-25, and for this you get someone who is used to cleaning to Swiss standards, which is nice)
• Crans-Montana is not as well known as Gstaad because wealth whispers. (GL: Rubbish. Italians have been flaunting wealth for years in Crans-Montana, but the Brits don’t mingle with them – a language problem?)
• You can’t make friends in Switzerland. It’s an expat’s life or nothing (GL: The woman quoted is 26, can’t have been here long or have lived in many cities, and she goes home to London every weekend – a little reminder needed here that life in any city is what you make it, but you do have to make an effort).
• Switzerland, and especially Geneva, is racist (GL: Calling kettles black, etc. – look around you when you get back home).

The Times is having a hayday with Geneva-drubbing in its Sunday 16 January edition: we get another Times article, by a different Times writer, saying Geneva has no nightlife, so it won’t be able to attract London’s high-flying financial companies. He quotes the Economic Development agency in the city and some relocation agencies, looks briefly at the Glocals.com website. He doesn’t find much going on. It’s not at all clear that he actually visited Geneva  to write this. He makes the weird remark that a lack of nightlife and no show-off flashy lifestyles “constitutes one of the main obstacles facing Geneva, along with the rest of Switzerland, in the quest to attract the financial sector away from London.” (GL: Surely people with the smarts to make that kind of money can figure out how to spend it having fun? And outside London, not many people think Switzerland is scrambling hard to attract these people.)

And then the Telegraph jumps into the fray, but with a much more upbeat story, which appears the same day. I suspect they heard about the Times articles and decided to write the opposite story. But it, too, suggests London’s financial crowd wants its Little London in Zug or Geneva. Some do. Many don’t, from what I’ve seen.

From the Telegraph:

• “Jay-walking [is] an arrestable offence” (GL: And yet people do it all the time, but people are very rarely stopped for it unless they do it in front of a bored police offier – but hasn’t the journalist ever been to California? Switzerland is pretty relaxed on this, compared to a lot of places)
• “Each of Switzerland’s 27 self-governing cantons sets its own tax rate, many with ultra-low levels to attract foreign finance firms and workers.” (GL: true, but the thing that makes Switzerland interesting for staff is the relatively low income tax rates for individuals, which apply to all of us, not just rich bankers)
• “The Swiss, a conservative nation, generally expect mothers to look after their own children.” (GL: an urban myth related to the idea that Swiss women don’t work – although this was true 35 years ago. Things change. Switzerland has one of Europe’s highest number of couples where the husband works full-time, the wife part-time: twice as many as the number of couples where the wife does not work, which is about equal to the number of couples where both work full-time. And it has one of the highest percentages of couples where both work part-time, according to 2008 figures published by the UN’s Economic Commission for Europe. Childcare options are limited, but changing. The Swiss political system reacts slowly.)
• Switzerland’s 27 cantons (GL: 26 – more on them at www.ch.ch)

I’m left with a sense that the British, or maybe just British bankers and wealthy Brits, don’t relocate well. Fortunately, I know quite a few of them in Switzerland, and I suspect that the ones who like to live well and who know how to spend their money well were all out doing that when the UK journalists came to town for a day. The problem might be that these people are hard to spot: they’ve learned how to fit in and enjoy life.

Links to other sites:

• Times, UK: “Bonus supertax sends the City’s super-rich to Switzerland”,
• Times: “Lack of Nightlife could dull Geneva’s appeal”
• Telegraph, “British bankers find the good life in Switzerland – even before tax“
• Swiss federal government page on tax forfeits (lump sum taxation)
• social networks popular with English-speakers in Switzerland: English Forum, Glocals
• to keep track of what’s happening in the Lake Geneva region: our own very popular blog for newcomers in Geneva, Geneva’s best-read source of news in English (guess who!) and GenevaLunch resources and events
• radio in English
• Geneva Welcome Centre has a What’s on page in English, and the Sortir web page at TSR (public television) has the most complete listing around of music, movies, shows and other entertainment in the region.

A Swiss man with a terrace overlooking the airport in Samui, Thailand, appears to have been the first person to put photos of the Koh Samui crash in early August online, reports Andy, editor of the Bangkok Bugle, a blog on Thailand and the media there. Within 20 minutes of the crash, the man had posted them on a forum and from there they zoomed to Twitter and from there – the world, mostly with no credit to him. There was an intermediate stop, however: when he posted them on the forum he also sent them off to Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger, which did the decent thing and credited him and asked for more photos (here’s a link – forgive us for not showing the image here :–). But the rest of the world didn’t bother too much about the credit or copyright, it seems. He never gave up the copyright – as the author, it’s always yours but conditions of use need discussion – but it sounds like it ran away from him and once gone, you can’t easily get it back.

The post on the Bangkok Bugle raises a lot of issues that need more discussion: how do citizen journalists protect their copyright, how much do citizen journalists know and understand of media laws, how much do media laws in most countries reflect aging dinosaur mainstream media rather than today’s world, and more. Tages-Anzeiger could have done a few things to protect his work, such as embedding his copyright information in the image code, making sure they didn’t run it too large online, and then tracking anyone who ran the image. The last is the most important bit, but the number of media organizations with those kinds of resources is pretty rare.

Twitter and Facebook are the real gray area for most people, individuals and media producers alike. There is a lot of discussion out there about using photos from them, but one of the tricky bits is the right of media people to call on the notion of “fair use” and just use them for news. Ok, but then who is the media, legally speaking? Are aggregators and sites that copy news true news sites? Are legitimate journalists working alone news sites? If you put together a chatty online newsletter for the 10 houses on your street, does that make you an editor? The questions are endless.

One small but common misperception needs airing, too: the idea that information from citizen journalists is often worth serious money. Let’s be realistic – media companies just about everywhere are in far worse financial condition than they say publicly, they barely pay their journalists, they have next to nothing left for freelancers. Time Magazine this week has four ads. Four. Even if they cost a fortune by most people’s standards, that won’t pay the rent, never mind salaries.

But what about those once in a great while photos worth millions, sold to The Sun or Fox?

Buy a lottery ticket; your chances are better.

For the record, I liked the photographer’s attitude, as quoted by Andy. His main concern was to inform people. Now that’s an attitude worth a fortune!

I can’t count the number of people from other countries (outside the US) who have told me they just don’t understand the US bankruptcy system. I occasionally make a stab at explaining it, saying that the idea behind Chapter 11 is that you don’t kill off the business, but help it get back on its feet. Trying to explain why this isn’t unfair to people owed money by the company that is in difficulty is something I do less well. I still get riled when I think about the $650 I was owed by Robert Maxell, once Rupert Murdoch’s rival, when Maxwell fell overboard at sea. The lawyers hired to sort out his unhealthy financial situation wrote to me at least twice a year for five or more years to tell me I was unlikely to get any money, but they were trying. No comment.

So here is a living, breathing example of how the system works. The Minneapolis Star & Tribune, one of the top 20 US newspapers for decades, filed for bankruptcy at the end of 2008. It was suffering, like everyone else in the media industry, from weaker business, fading advertising revenue and problems specific to its own financial history. The Star (actually known locally as the Strib) will soon rise, it seems. Read all about it!

[new tags added 15 July] We’ve known since Barack Obama was elected president that new technology was going to be part of the deal, but even so, it’s surprising to get a press release from the US government saying Obama would like to hear from citizens around the world about his trip to Ghana and his Africa speech. And they certainly have replied! It makes for pretty interesting reading, and I get the feeling that he might even take these remarks into account because the great thing all of this does is make you aware there’s a real human being in the Oval Office.

The technology is not the star here, though: Obama’s administration puts to shame most corporations and certainly other governments, when it comes to using the technology intelligently and effectively. This has been coming through clearly to those of us in Geneva who’ve watched the transformation in recent months of the web site, Facebook and Twitter activities of the US Mission, which stands out for its good use of new technology. As a journalist, I’d have to say they have made my job easier, and other groups looking to push their message would do well to study their example.

The comments, the world map with SMS comments just sent in (my personal favourite), Twitter: search for #obamaghana

People who speak English and live in the Lake Geneva region, particularly at the Geneva end of the lake, continue to see more options for finding out what’s happening. Catherine Nelson-Polloard, who contributes regularly to GenevaLunch with her Nyon Notes, was recently featured in 24 Heures and the Tribune de Geneve for another blog she writes, Living in Nyon, which provides practical tips for people in the area.

Swisster, published by Edipresse, today writes that it plans to contribute to Radio Cité by providing radio material during the French station’s weekly news show in English. The Geneva Community notes that its eVoice bulletin announcements on the station, at 92.2FM, will be moving to a Thursday 11:30 slot.

Many thanks go to Barbara Boldt for taking copious notes and sharing them, on my presentation to GWIT (Geneva Women in International Trade), "Leveraging your online life."

I’ve been contacted by several people who knew they would have to miss the talk, to ask if I could share it with them. Barbara’s notes are quite complete, so I invite you to visit the GWIT press page and learn about why you should google yourself and how, to start. One of the guests also videotaped part of the talk and we may carry a clip from that here a little later.

I wrote recently that my pending visit to the Geneva Suite at the Kempinski had been delayed due to the Saudi Crown Prince staying there. The Kempinski was good enough to share some images of the new suite’s rooms.

Not bad, not bad. The living room is too somber for my taste, but the bathroom is magnificent – and you guessed right, the view is straight out over Geneva’s jet d’eau. For CHF50,000* a night it is the view you would expect.

*Ed. note: At today’s exchange rate, this is a shade under $50,000, for interested foreigners.

Photos reproduced with permission, Kempinski Grand Hotel Geneva (click on images to view larger)

The day is getting long, the dishes aren’t done yet, the e-mails are not all answered -  and suddenly London’s Mail on Sunday offers the opportunity to sink into the black hole of learning more about the rich.

Photo (reproduced with permission, Rick Malman/Alinghi): Ernesto Bertarelli’s Alinghi is the current holder of the sailing world’s America’s Cup. Here, October 2007, he looks at models of "J hull" sailing vessels in the model room of the New York Yacht Club, the Cup’s original home.

While the Sunday Times in Britain churned out its number-heavy list of the country’s wealthiest people the Daily Mail, true to form, spewed curious bits of information about them. We learn that Kirsty Bertarelli nearly died of meningitis when she was young. Her mother is quoted as saying of the daughter’s marriage to a wealthy Swiss man, "You never know what will happen in life. Nobody knows how they are going to end up." I hope she managed a brighter toast than that at the wedding, if women were allowed to toast. No news here on why the Bertarellis are suddenly considered British, while Forbes and Swiss authorities seem to consider them Swiss residents. Spain, France and New York seem to be the places where Ernesto Bertarello spends most of his time these days.

We also learn that Prince Charles is not listed despite having a sizable fortune estimated at

[Update: "For $50,000 you should get the jet d'eau"]
Just when you think you’ll be dipping your toes in super-luxury the Saudi Crown Prince comes along and brings you back to Earth. I was still wondering what shoes to wear on my imminent visit to the Geneva Suite at the Grand Hotel Kempinski Geneva, unsure about the lushness of the carpet or heel marks on fine wood, when I was told the suite is a victim of its own success: Crown Prince Sultan Ben Abdel Aziz is in town for a routine health checkup at the Genolier Clinique, and the extraordinary suite (I had a glimpse of the 1,080m2, unfinished, several weeks ago) and just about every other good hotel room in town were suddenly taken over the weekend. My visit will have to wait.

You will have to wait to find out what the interior is really like, as well as the going rate for the room, but at least now you know who is likely to stay there. My visit will probably be shorter than his since I’m going for the inauguration, which if I read the invitation correctly does not include an overnight stay.

Photo: shoes by the pool, Ellen Wallace

Two items about upcoming events, just in:

If you fly out the door you might make it to see "The Pursuit of Happyness" with Will Smith, in English with French sub-titles, at the Atlantic Cinema in Lausanne. Proceeds go to the Habitat for Humanity project at Brillantmont School, where a group of students and teachers are raising funds to go to Romania in June to build houses. Show time at 20:00 tonight, Thursday, tickets are CHF10.

The Geneva Welcome Center has 50 tickets to give away to the Switzerland-Sweden rugby match in Nyon Saturday 19 April. Details they’ve sent us:

We have 50 tickets for a RUGBY match SWITZERLAND-SWEDEN  that will take place on Saturday 19 April 2008 from 15:00 at the Stade de Colovray in Nyon.
If you are interested you should be quick. The tickets can be picked up at the Geneva Welcome Centre (106 route de Ferney, 1203 Geneva, tel: +41 22 546 1400) from 09:00 to 13:00 and from 14:00 to 18:00. Important: Please bring your legitimization card from your mission, organization or NGO. This offer is available on  Friday 11 April 2008.

We will not be able to reserve any tickets. Have a good match. And a big thank you to our partner "Rugby Club Nyon" for their generosity.