Of course all cultures, all governments, all societies are equal, who are we to judge. War is bad, sex is good, even with your mother or brother.
Switzerland considers repealing incest laws
Switzerland is considering repealing its incest laws because they are "obsolete".
Allan Hall in Berlin
13 Dec 2010
The upper house of the Swiss parliament has drafted a law decriminalising sex between consenting family members which must now be considered by the government.
There have been only three cases of incest since 1984.
Switzerland, which recently held a referendum passing a draconian law that will boot out foreigners convicted of committing the smallest of crimes, insists that children within families will continue to be protected by laws governing abuse and paedophilia.
Daniel Vischer, a Green party MP, said he saw nothing wrong with two consenting adults having sex, even if they were related.
"Incest is a difficult moral question, but not one that is answered by penal law," he said.
Barbara Schmid Federer of The Christian People's Party of Switzerland said the proposal from the upper house was "completely repugnant."
"I for one could not countenance painting out such a law from the statute books."
The Protestant People's Party is also opposed to decriminalising the offence which at present carries a maximum three year jail term.
A spokesman for the party said: "Murder is also quite rare in Switzerland but no one suggests that we remove that as an office from the statutes."
war
Showing posts with label Switzerland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Switzerland. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Friday, August 13, 2010
Switzerland: Another Reason to Avoid Visiting (beyond their need to get back to nature and adopt cows)
12 August 2010
BBC News
Swede faces world-record $1m speeding penalty
The Swede was driving a Mercedes SLS AMG - which has a top speed of 317km/h A Swedish motorist caught driving at 290km/h (180mph) in Switzerland could be given a world-record speeding fine of SFr1.08m ($1m; £656,000), prosecutors say.
The 37-year-old, who has not been named, was clocked driving his Mercedes sports car at 170km/h over the limit.
Under Swiss law, the level of fine is determined by the wealth of the driver and the speed recorded.
In January, a Swiss driver was fined $290,000 - the current world record.
Local police spokesman Benoit Dumas said of the latest case that "nothing can justify a speed of 290km/h".
"It is not controllable. It must have taken 500m to stop," he said.
The Swede's car - a Mercedes SLS AMG - has been impounded and in principle he could be forced to pay a daily fine of SFr3,600 for 300 days.
ahmazing
BBC News
Swede faces world-record $1m speeding penalty
The Swede was driving a Mercedes SLS AMG - which has a top speed of 317km/h A Swedish motorist caught driving at 290km/h (180mph) in Switzerland could be given a world-record speeding fine of SFr1.08m ($1m; £656,000), prosecutors say.
The 37-year-old, who has not been named, was clocked driving his Mercedes sports car at 170km/h over the limit.
Under Swiss law, the level of fine is determined by the wealth of the driver and the speed recorded.
In January, a Swiss driver was fined $290,000 - the current world record.
Local police spokesman Benoit Dumas said of the latest case that "nothing can justify a speed of 290km/h".
"It is not controllable. It must have taken 500m to stop," he said.
The Swede's car - a Mercedes SLS AMG - has been impounded and in principle he could be forced to pay a daily fine of SFr3,600 for 300 days.
ahmazing
Saturday, July 24, 2010
The Swiss and THEIR funny world
Swiss adopt cows for the summer
By Alexandra Troubnikoff (AFP)
July 13, 2010
LA LECHERETTE, Switzerland — Most Swiss head to the beaches for their vacations, but others are opting for a rustic holiday in the mountains where they are spending time with their adopted cows over the summer.
Launched five years ago by herder Michel Izoz, a cow adoption project called Mavachamoi -- word play in French for "my cow" -- is proving popular among urban dwellers in Switzerland.
Among the 20 cows available for rent at his farm in La Lecherette in the canton Vaud, only Ilda, Rosette, Tola, Ursula, Usine and Quenele are still available. All the others have been booked for the summer.
Izoz noted that some cows are more popular than others, especially those with horns as they "appear more authentic."
Clients go online to the website www.mavachamoi.ch for a catalogue showcasing the cows on post-card perfect meadows. For 280 euros (350 dollars) , they can reserve a cow for a season, during which they can visit the animal as often as they wish.
Most reservations are made as gifts, Izoz said, pointing out that the project offers a chance for city dwellers to compare "the stressed out world of the cities and the hard lives in the mountains."
Izoz told AFP that he had started the project mainly to "show people that farming life is really different from what we imagine."
To put forward his point, Izoz requires clients to spend at least four hours working at the farm, during which they are to round up the herd, cut wood, participate in the treatment or making of cheese prepared in wood fire in the large copper vats.
"Often, it makes my son laugh" to see the city people doing the farmwork that requires some dexterity, said Esther Ginier, another farmer who offers 16 cows for rent at her farm in La Comballaz.
Most end up being surprised by how hard life can be in the idyllic mountain pastures through which they hike during the weekends, said Katherine Bolay, a retiree participating in the project with her husband.
"They discover that the mountain pastures is seven days a week, we do not get Sundays off and we have little vacation," Ginier pointed out.
"We are most stressed by the weather, we live with nature, and its rules," said the Vaudoise farmer at her 17th-century farmhouse, decorated with flowers and antique bells.
The adoption also offers other surprises.
"The children discover in Switzerland, the country of cows, that milk does not come from packets. Straight from the udder, it's smooth, it's warm, it's sweet," said Bolay.
Parents meanwhile also manage to revisit their childhood memories. They also often leave with farm products, said her husband Jacques Bolay.
They realise that "the cows are not that dumb and that like people, they have their own character, with a dominant one, a curious one, a greedy one... and even nasty ones which charge at us," he said.
Claude Kobler has adopted Sirene since 2007.
For him, it is about making a contribution to the alpine herders.
But what makes the IT consultant of a Geneva bank happy is the contact with the different world.
His Fribourgeouis speckled cow appears, too, to enjoy the patronage, "as it produces more and more milk."
By Alexandra Troubnikoff (AFP)
July 13, 2010
LA LECHERETTE, Switzerland — Most Swiss head to the beaches for their vacations, but others are opting for a rustic holiday in the mountains where they are spending time with their adopted cows over the summer.
Launched five years ago by herder Michel Izoz, a cow adoption project called Mavachamoi -- word play in French for "my cow" -- is proving popular among urban dwellers in Switzerland.
Among the 20 cows available for rent at his farm in La Lecherette in the canton Vaud, only Ilda, Rosette, Tola, Ursula, Usine and Quenele are still available. All the others have been booked for the summer.
Izoz noted that some cows are more popular than others, especially those with horns as they "appear more authentic."
Clients go online to the website www.mavachamoi.ch for a catalogue showcasing the cows on post-card perfect meadows. For 280 euros (350 dollars) , they can reserve a cow for a season, during which they can visit the animal as often as they wish.
Most reservations are made as gifts, Izoz said, pointing out that the project offers a chance for city dwellers to compare "the stressed out world of the cities and the hard lives in the mountains."
Izoz told AFP that he had started the project mainly to "show people that farming life is really different from what we imagine."
To put forward his point, Izoz requires clients to spend at least four hours working at the farm, during which they are to round up the herd, cut wood, participate in the treatment or making of cheese prepared in wood fire in the large copper vats.
"Often, it makes my son laugh" to see the city people doing the farmwork that requires some dexterity, said Esther Ginier, another farmer who offers 16 cows for rent at her farm in La Comballaz.
Most end up being surprised by how hard life can be in the idyllic mountain pastures through which they hike during the weekends, said Katherine Bolay, a retiree participating in the project with her husband.
"They discover that the mountain pastures is seven days a week, we do not get Sundays off and we have little vacation," Ginier pointed out.
"We are most stressed by the weather, we live with nature, and its rules," said the Vaudoise farmer at her 17th-century farmhouse, decorated with flowers and antique bells.
The adoption also offers other surprises.
"The children discover in Switzerland, the country of cows, that milk does not come from packets. Straight from the udder, it's smooth, it's warm, it's sweet," said Bolay.
Parents meanwhile also manage to revisit their childhood memories. They also often leave with farm products, said her husband Jacques Bolay.
They realise that "the cows are not that dumb and that like people, they have their own character, with a dominant one, a curious one, a greedy one... and even nasty ones which charge at us," he said.
Claude Kobler has adopted Sirene since 2007.
For him, it is about making a contribution to the alpine herders.
But what makes the IT consultant of a Geneva bank happy is the contact with the different world.
His Fribourgeouis speckled cow appears, too, to enjoy the patronage, "as it produces more and more milk."
Sunday, January 17, 2010
TAXATION WITH REPRESENTATION is still thievery
How high is high, when it comes to taxing me? If you know that the American people oppose taxes, nearly universally - especially on them. Tax someone else - THEM, and it is fine, but don't tax ME. What if I taxed oil companies 2% on all money invested in foreign exploration of oil fields and 1% on all domestic oil projects (1% of all revenue raised from those sites). What if I taxed BONUSES 50% when those bonuses were $100,000 or more. What if I taxed 'golden parachutes' at 60% - that is the package would be taxed as a whole. How many people would oppose this? Only the super rich right?
Then the oil company raises gas prices, tire companies raise tire prices, grocery stores raise food prices to pay for increase in tire and gas cost, and so on and so on and so on. In the end who is hurt THE MOST?
The poor.
The rich are not any richer, but they are surviving. The poor will not survive.
If you were one of those rich people, what MIGHT you begin to consider doing?
In England if you make GBP 200,000 bonus (from the article):
Just look at the tax on a bonus of £200,000. First, there is the new bonus tax of 50%, which costs the company another £87,500. Then there is employer’s National Insurance of £25,600. Then the employee pays income tax at 40% on the £200,000, which is £80,000, and employee’s NI, another £2,000. So the total tax is a whopping £195,100. This represents a 98% tax burden on the net payment of £200,000 to the employee.
You get £9,000. Great return. Next year, work just as ... well, maybe not. Maybe don't work at all.
Bonus supertax sends the City's super-rich to Switzerland
As taxes are hiked here, City moneymakers are heading for the high life in Switzerland. How will they survive all that clean living?
Eleanor Mills
Sunday Times, of London
January 17, 2010
Money talks, but wealth whispers. And Switzerland is the snowcapped, landlocked Bermuda Triangle of the cashocracy, where those with serious swag go to quietly disappear among their own kind.
As the financial weather worsens in Britain — bankers are being taxed 50% on this year’s bonuses, and from April half of any income over £150,000 will go straight to the Inland Revenue — many of our super-rich are threatening to abandon London. Discreet advisers in Geneva, Zurich and the high-end Swiss ski resorts say that a steady trickle of wealthy Brits have either made the move or are strongly considering a new life in the mountains. In December alone eight British-based hedge funds decided to move there.
“They want to be out of the UK by April,” says David Butler of Kinetic, which provides services for hedge funds. “There’s a lot of momentum to leave. Geneva is the most popular choice. These people are a kind of club: they go where the others are.” He predicts that up to 150 funds will follow.
Really? Would you want to? And what is life like when you get there? I headed off to the land of mountains and money to find out.
James is 39. Like many City high-flyers of his age, he already has a stash of money in the bank. It would be rude to ask exactly how much, but he talks rather pityingly of those with “only five or 10 million”; he was at the sharp end of some pretty big deals in emerging markets at a top investment bank in the early Noughties; he will never have to work again. In an enormous loft in Geneva, we drink Bollinger and discuss why he has decided to settle in Switzerland.
The apartment, like the other uber-pricey Swiss abodes I visit, is decked out in impeccable banker chic: a symphony of tasteful taupe and greige, all smooth chrome and marble, with unbelievably over-the-top appliances and storage hidden within invisible press-touch cupboards. I conclude that the more stuff you own, the more you invest in keeping it invisible.
But back to James. London he finds claustrophobic — too many people he went to school with, who know too much about him. “I just feel freer out of England,” he shrugs. “In Switzerland I can be who I’ve become, not what I was.” His girlfriend — blonde, tall, cashmere jersey, fur gilet and jeans — laughs. She says he is always pretty crabby on British soil. He hates the traffic and the time it takes to get anywhere. That’s where Geneva scores; its airport is just 15 minutes from the centre by taxi. Everyone I meet mentions this. Is the best thing about Switzerland that it is easy to get away?
For James, good transport links are crucial. His natural habitats are New York, Hong Kong and Shanghai. He is intending to spend much more time in Shanghai, because “that is where it is most happening, man. The energy is terrific”. James is loaded enough to talk like a hipster and dress like a scruffy snowboarder; you would have no idea how rich he is if you passed him in the street.
But when he’s not getting his fix of scintillating cities and investing “a little for me and friends”, the mountains are his passion, particularly biking (he has a £1,000 road bike) and ski-touring (where you walk up on skins most of the morning and descend in virgin powder). High in the Alps, where the white peaks glisten in the painfully bright sunshine and the sky is a chocolate-box blue — this, he tells me, eyes shining, is where he feels most alive. What could be better for a master of the universe than pumping adrenaline and lungfuls of pure air — and all only a two-hour train ride from Geneva? Oh yeah, and the tax deal is pretty damn dreamy too.
As a British citizen, “I’d get totally clobbered by the taxman if I came back to London”, he admits. He is not wrong. Mike Warburton, tax director at Grant Thornton accountants, says: “If he returned to the UK, he would be taxed on his worldwide income and gains as a UK resident domiciled individual.” Say James has £40m invested, and is getting a paltry return of 2% a year (£800,000); it would give him a tax bill of around £400,000. He would also be clobbered, says Warburton, “on income and gains arising after his return to the UK from any capital built up while he was overseas, and gains are taxable at 18%. Even if he put the capital into an offshore trust, he would still be caught by tax-avoidance rules in the UK. Not an appealing prospect.”
In Switzerland, by contrast, life is sweet. All that is required is a deal with the local canton to pay a flat yearly forfait (forfeit). Happily for bankers, it is all negotiable: the better connected your tax lawyer is with the local canton official, the better your deal. The Swiss are famously good at keeping financial secrets, so there is no published list of which canton charges what, but the going rate in Geneva, the most expensive one, is about £180,000 a year. It sounds a lot, but it is much less than you would pay in London. The most popular cantons for rich Brits are Geneva, Vaud and the Valais, because they negotiate favourable forfeits and the locals speak French. In the Swiss-German part of Switzerland, Schaffhausen and Zug are very popular.
Another option is to become a resident, which is fairly simple as long as you are rich and from America or the EU, then pay tax at the local rates, which are linked to the value of property and are typically only 20% of income. When you are sitting on as much money as James, the tax deal feels as invigorating as the mountain air.
It needs to, because Switzerland is Dullsville. Even Geneva (population smaller than York’s) feels provincial. The old town is attractive: grand avenues and tall, flat-fronted stone buildings. On the evening I arrive, it is full of people dressed like d’Artagnan, drinking vin chaud and eating marzipan vegetables to celebrate Escalade (the defeat of the Duke of Savoy, who attacked the city in 1602). Even so, it seems quiet. There are hardly any normal shops: most seem to sell only diamonds and furs (presents for the mistress after a visit to the private bank).
A lawyer I met in Geneva told me he drives to France to go to the supermarket. I don’t blame him; Swiss prices certainly favour the super-rich. I took James and his girlfriend out for supper at a studenty restaurant where they serve only steak and chips: £150 for three, excluding service. The other downside is that everyone looks the same: flat boots, jeans, tasteful warm coats. After London, Geneva feels grey and middle-aged. But it is safe — you can carry around wads of 1,000 (£600) Swiss franc notes and not worry.
I always thought that the best part about being really rich would be that you could live the life you always wanted. So, do you dream of Switzerland? Fiona, a friend who grew up in Zurich, says: “There seems to be a giant megaphone in Switzerland which at 9pm shouts ‘Go to bed’. Nothing happens. It’s the most boring place on earth.”
Switzerland is also the nearest democracy to a police state; life is unbelievably regulated. “When you buy a house, you sign up to the règlements of the commune,” explained Matthew Parish, of Hogan & Hartson solicitors, in his swanky offices in Geneva’s old town. “These specify everything from where and when you can hang out your washing to the exact colour of the flowers in the window boxes of the whole village.” Parish liked his village — “less than 20 minutes to the centre of Geneva by car and no traffic” — and felt pretty sanguine about the petty rules. I was aghast.
Another long-term resident was less happy: he had sat for 10 minutes in his car one evening listening to the end of a World Service programme. The next morning he had a note from the commune telling him he had broken the rules and it must not happen again. On another occasion he left his car — legally — in a car park when he went on holiday; on his return he was visited by Interpol and asked why he had not moved it.
There is no bending the rules. If you default on your mortgage, you will be put in jail. No wonder everyone looks the same. The place is set up to be as homogenous as possible. It makes you long for some spark of individuality. But the rich, of course, are different. They’re rich. And they get that way by caring a good deal about money: making it, multiplying it, hanging onto it and giving as little as possible to the taxman. All over Switzerland is a particular advert showing a smug man with a very swanky watch and his son: “You never own a Patek Philippe, you merely look after it for the next generation.” Switzerland is all about hanging on to the dosh for the next generation.
James, not surprisingly, is very enthusiastic about the country. “It’s fantastic. It’s never had a king or queen, so there is no aristocracy. It was originally three cantons, which in 1291 rebelled against the Austrian princes, who were demanding too much tax. They fought for independence and have remained a self-governing federation ever since.”
Switzerland is also enormously stable: 100-year mortgages are common, property is a safe investment, and the average income is $68,000, against $44,000 in the UK. The Swiss are unlikely to bring in the kind of arbitrary tax changes that have made London’s bankers so jumpy.
It may be politically popular to tax the bankers — Labour earned a rare lift in the polls when the bonus levy was announced — but the government estimates that the top 1% of all taxpayers (many of whom work in finance) will pay 24% of all income tax in 2009-10. The top 5% pay 43% of the total. Tempting though it is to tax the rich as a way of blaming bankers for the crisis (which has cost every British family £12,000), most of them are super-mobile and don’t have to be here. Alienating them means losing the fiscal manna they bring in taxes. And with the budget deficit at a record high, we need all the revenues we can get.
Of course there is some special pleading by the bankers in all this. But just because they are squealing doesn’t mean that London as a financial centre is not under threat. A recent poll of Bloomberg subscribers found Britain had dropped behind Singapore into third place as the city most likely to be the best financial hub two years from now; and a survey of executives found that Shanghai could overtake London within 10 years.
The change in the financial weather in London is not just talk. Several big British-based hedge funds have already moved, including Jabre Capital, while Blue Crest and Bevan Howard are moving substantial numbers of staff to Geneva. I went to visit another hedge fund, Amplitude Capital, whose chairman, Karsten Schroeder, 34, last year shifted all his employees from Mayfair to the canton of Zug (corporation tax as low as 12%).
Zug is 35 minutes from Zurich by train and three hours from Geneva, but feels much more foreign. The Swiss-Germans are not friendly and the language is impenetrable. When I alight in Zug it is -9C. Mist hangs over the lake, and the mountains loom intermittently through the gloom. The industrial estate where Schroeder’s offices are is still being built. It would be hard to imagine anywhere less like London. Shivering in my taxi, surrounded by ugly concrete, I feel a real longing for such Mayfair landmarks as Fortnum’s, the Royal Academy and Burlington Arcade.
The German-born Schroeder is obviously made of sterner stuff. Drawn to the City in its heyday five years ago, he couldn’t wait to leave. “London is expensive and dirty,” he says. “Everything was terrible — trains, airports, water, roads. The service was bad in shops and restaurants. It was all ‘We appreciate your concern but we couldn’t care f***ing less.’”
Then he brags: “In Mayfair I had 50 square metres; in Zug I have 500 and I pay the same price.” His office is certainly palatial — a vast glass-and-steel expanse. In the loo is an orchid. In the atrium, a harp. Does he play? “Do I look like the kind of man who plays the harp?” he snaps. Actually, he does: hairless and antiseptic, he looks more harpist than action man (though he pulls on a red Formula One jacket to drive me to the station in his top-of-the-range white Mercedes and can’t stop telling me how “outdoorsy” he is).
So why did he move his hedge fund? The last straw, he says, was when he was travelling back with his skis and a London cab driver refused to take them: “‘Can’t. It’s in my terms and conditions. I don’t have to take them if I don’t want to.’ I just thought, that’s it. I’ve had enough of London.”
There may have been other reasons, too. David Butler, from Kinetic, the firm that helped Schroeder move to Zug, says pending regulations, and taxes rising to 50%, have started an exodus. The only reason Butler has not moved already himself, he says in his posh offices high above the City, is that his Russian wife likes Highgate.
Schroeder has no wife to veto the move. “I didn’t really warm to London,” he says. “We are a systematic [computerised] fund and we have huge servers, so lots of space makes it easier. In London we were always having hassles with landlords.” He employs mathematicians and physicists, of which Zurich University has a rich supply.
Echoing James, who is furious that the foreign bankers he worked with could settle in Britain without paying any tax under our non-domiciled rules, Schroeder says: “It always seemed unfair that foreigners paid so much less tax than the average Brit. I’m not surprised the government is raising the top rates and cracking down on non-doms.” From the end of January non-doms will pay a £30,000 flat rate. And after April the annual tax and National Insurance bill for a Brit earning £500,000 will rise from under £200,000 to more than £235,000.
Why did Schroeder choose Zug? “It wasn’t just a tax thing — Malta, the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands have lower taxes, but they are too remote and difficult from a business perspective. Singapore or Hong Kong could be good, but the air quality is bad and they’re a long way from Europe. Switzerland is the perfect combination of lifestyle and regulatory environment.”
For him Britain’s problems are far more deep-seated than the tax regime or the infrastructure. “Britain is too dependent on the financial sector. France and Germany at least still make things; you don’t. You have a big problem — you should be investing in education and infrastructure and changing the basis of the economy.”
Our immigration policy arouses his particular ire: he says it is so out of control that the country is buckling under the strain. “In Switzerland all immigrants become part of the community, get good jobs.” With minimal crime and a high standard of living (he pays his cleaner 40 Swiss francs an hour — £24 pounds — against £9 in London), it is a better society. “Here you see children of six or seven walking to school alone. It’s more old-fashioned. It’s a calm, peaceful life.”
Schroeder says Zug reminds him of the places where he was brought up in rural Germany. But he admits that not all his British employees like the place: “Some have gone back. If you are 22, you might wonder what on earth you are doing here.”
For most Brits, Switzerland is synonymous with Zermatt, Gstaad, St Moritz. The very names are shorthand for luxury, money and glitz, and it is to these resorts that many City types who have made their pile are moving. They are certainly more appealing than Geneva or Zug. Brothers Charlie and Simon Jackson from Somerset spent much of their childhood in Crans Montana. Crans is less well known than other ski centres, but that is because, as Charlie puts it, “Wealth whispers. Crans has always been more discreet.” The actor Roger Moore, the head of Carrefour supermarkets (the French Tesco) and several British aristos have chalets here.
The Jacksons are chalet whisperers. Swisch, their company, sells extremely upmarket property to seriously rich City types. They run the kind of bespoke service you can only imagine if you are the type who keeps a Porsche Cayenne in your garage just waiting for you and your mink-lined moon boots. Think deerskin cupboards with antler handles, cookers so high-tech they don’t turn on until you put a little butter in the pan, humidors for £5,000. Prices start at a million Swiss francs (£600,000). If you need to ask, you can’t afford it.
“We’ve seen a real change in how people are buying,” says Charlie. “Before, they would buy an apartment to use for skiing and perhaps come out once in the summer. But we now have four British clients, including a hedge-funder, looking to live out here most of the time. They want to become resident in Switzerland — for tax purposes, sure, but also because they’ve had enough of England.”
Crans, like Verbier and Zermatt, where the Jacksons also operate, is in the Valais canton (a good one when it comes to negotiating tax forfeits) and is near the Italian border, where people are more relaxed. Charlie lived last year in Crans, putting his three small children into the local school, “where they learnt mostly skiing and maths” (how Swiss). “Here they don’t have any of those rules about children that make English life so oppressive. I was entrusted with a group of five-year-olds from my child’s class. I took them up the mountain and skied down. It’s much more old-fashioned, and children respect adults more.”
Crans is a good place to relocate because it’s almost as busy in summer as in winter, thanks to its world championship golf course. It is also popular with Italians, so the coffee is excellent, as is the shopping — Chanel, Hermès, Vuitton. Charlie’s younger brother, Simon, a fixture on the Verbier party scene and a real charmer, says: “We often get two or three families who decide to buy here together and holiday together. Otherwise it can get lonely. You won’t be making Swiss friends, especially in a resort.”
The Swiss may allow rich foreigners to settle, but they do not take them to their hearts. “It’s an expat life,” explained Elizabeth Gregory, 26, who left her job as a trader at Morgan Stanley to work for Advanced Currency Markets SA, a Geneva online trading-services company. Her headline salary is lower than in the City, but “I am £1,000 a month better off”. She needs to be. A room in a shared house, “which I was amazingly lucky to get”, costs her 3,000 Swiss francs a month.
“There isn’t a great deal to do here,” she admits with a smile. The only thing open on a Sunday is her gym; she misses London nightlife and her friends, but she is learning French and intends to live in several countries before retiring at 35. (Wow, these bankers make you feel old.) She goes home to London most weekends.
Might her London banking friends follow her out here? “Sure, why not?” she says, sipping white wine. “They’re all pretty pissed off at the tax on bonuses and the new top rate of 50%. People like me, we’re motivated by money. If you take so much away in tax, there’s no incentive.”
Just look at the tax on a bonus of £200,000. First, there is the new bonus tax of 50%, which costs the company another £87,500. Then there is employer’s National Insurance of £25,600. Then the employee pays income tax at 40% on the £200,000, which is £80,000, and employee’s NI, another £2,000. So the total tax is a whopping £195,100. This represents a 98% tax burden on the net payment of £200,000 to the employee.
One old City hand said: “There’s a parallel with when the Eurodollar market was setting up in Paris in the 1970s and the French slapped a tax on it. By contrast, the Bank of England said we won’t do that, come over here, and the French and the Americans all did, which was the start of London’s pre-eminence as a financial centre. I get a strong feeling of desperation in the City now.”
The fear for the British Treasury is that a big international investment bank might relocate. So far, that has not happened. But Bob Diamond of Barclays Capital, one of Britain’s highest-paid bankers, warned last month: “Both financial capital and human capital are extremely mobile.”
Relocating to Switzerland is by no means a golden bullet, however. Geneva is full to bursting. Manpreet Dhami-Magne is regional director for Emigra Europe, which helps companies relocate. We talk in a pretty cafe over hot chocolate. She tells me the international schools are badly oversubscribed and, echoing Gregory, that it is very hard to find accommodation, particularly in Geneva. A banker’s wife moaned that “a perfectly ordinary family house in Geneva costs £9m”.
More worrying were Manpreet’s comments about Swiss society. She is Asian, from Birmingham, and is married to a Frenchman. She found it impossible to get an apartment because of her Asian name until she went to meet the estate agent with her white husband. “The Swiss are quite racist,” she says. “Rich white foreigners fit in fine, but I had an Asian friend who was stopped every time he came into Switzerland from France.”
Getting non-white and non-European technical staff into the country, and finding them somewhere to live, is “a challenge”, she says. Maybe that is why no major bank has yet moved.
En route to the airport on my way home, my taxi driver slammed on his brakes. We just — and I mean just — missed crashing into an old man on a crossing. “Gosh, that was close,” I said, somewhat shaken.
“Yes, that would have cost me 140 Swiss francs if I’d hit him,” the driver replied.
Hello? He’d nearly killed someone. I couldn’t believe money was the first thing he mentioned.
In Switzerland money talks. But that doesn’t mean it has anything to say.
taxes
Then the oil company raises gas prices, tire companies raise tire prices, grocery stores raise food prices to pay for increase in tire and gas cost, and so on and so on and so on. In the end who is hurt THE MOST?
The poor.
The rich are not any richer, but they are surviving. The poor will not survive.
If you were one of those rich people, what MIGHT you begin to consider doing?
In England if you make GBP 200,000 bonus (from the article):
Just look at the tax on a bonus of £200,000. First, there is the new bonus tax of 50%, which costs the company another £87,500. Then there is employer’s National Insurance of £25,600. Then the employee pays income tax at 40% on the £200,000, which is £80,000, and employee’s NI, another £2,000. So the total tax is a whopping £195,100. This represents a 98% tax burden on the net payment of £200,000 to the employee.
You get £9,000. Great return. Next year, work just as ... well, maybe not. Maybe don't work at all.
Bonus supertax sends the City's super-rich to Switzerland
As taxes are hiked here, City moneymakers are heading for the high life in Switzerland. How will they survive all that clean living?
Eleanor Mills
Sunday Times, of London
January 17, 2010
Money talks, but wealth whispers. And Switzerland is the snowcapped, landlocked Bermuda Triangle of the cashocracy, where those with serious swag go to quietly disappear among their own kind.
As the financial weather worsens in Britain — bankers are being taxed 50% on this year’s bonuses, and from April half of any income over £150,000 will go straight to the Inland Revenue — many of our super-rich are threatening to abandon London. Discreet advisers in Geneva, Zurich and the high-end Swiss ski resorts say that a steady trickle of wealthy Brits have either made the move or are strongly considering a new life in the mountains. In December alone eight British-based hedge funds decided to move there.
“They want to be out of the UK by April,” says David Butler of Kinetic, which provides services for hedge funds. “There’s a lot of momentum to leave. Geneva is the most popular choice. These people are a kind of club: they go where the others are.” He predicts that up to 150 funds will follow.
Really? Would you want to? And what is life like when you get there? I headed off to the land of mountains and money to find out.
James is 39. Like many City high-flyers of his age, he already has a stash of money in the bank. It would be rude to ask exactly how much, but he talks rather pityingly of those with “only five or 10 million”; he was at the sharp end of some pretty big deals in emerging markets at a top investment bank in the early Noughties; he will never have to work again. In an enormous loft in Geneva, we drink Bollinger and discuss why he has decided to settle in Switzerland.
The apartment, like the other uber-pricey Swiss abodes I visit, is decked out in impeccable banker chic: a symphony of tasteful taupe and greige, all smooth chrome and marble, with unbelievably over-the-top appliances and storage hidden within invisible press-touch cupboards. I conclude that the more stuff you own, the more you invest in keeping it invisible.
But back to James. London he finds claustrophobic — too many people he went to school with, who know too much about him. “I just feel freer out of England,” he shrugs. “In Switzerland I can be who I’ve become, not what I was.” His girlfriend — blonde, tall, cashmere jersey, fur gilet and jeans — laughs. She says he is always pretty crabby on British soil. He hates the traffic and the time it takes to get anywhere. That’s where Geneva scores; its airport is just 15 minutes from the centre by taxi. Everyone I meet mentions this. Is the best thing about Switzerland that it is easy to get away?
For James, good transport links are crucial. His natural habitats are New York, Hong Kong and Shanghai. He is intending to spend much more time in Shanghai, because “that is where it is most happening, man. The energy is terrific”. James is loaded enough to talk like a hipster and dress like a scruffy snowboarder; you would have no idea how rich he is if you passed him in the street.
But when he’s not getting his fix of scintillating cities and investing “a little for me and friends”, the mountains are his passion, particularly biking (he has a £1,000 road bike) and ski-touring (where you walk up on skins most of the morning and descend in virgin powder). High in the Alps, where the white peaks glisten in the painfully bright sunshine and the sky is a chocolate-box blue — this, he tells me, eyes shining, is where he feels most alive. What could be better for a master of the universe than pumping adrenaline and lungfuls of pure air — and all only a two-hour train ride from Geneva? Oh yeah, and the tax deal is pretty damn dreamy too.
As a British citizen, “I’d get totally clobbered by the taxman if I came back to London”, he admits. He is not wrong. Mike Warburton, tax director at Grant Thornton accountants, says: “If he returned to the UK, he would be taxed on his worldwide income and gains as a UK resident domiciled individual.” Say James has £40m invested, and is getting a paltry return of 2% a year (£800,000); it would give him a tax bill of around £400,000. He would also be clobbered, says Warburton, “on income and gains arising after his return to the UK from any capital built up while he was overseas, and gains are taxable at 18%. Even if he put the capital into an offshore trust, he would still be caught by tax-avoidance rules in the UK. Not an appealing prospect.”
In Switzerland, by contrast, life is sweet. All that is required is a deal with the local canton to pay a flat yearly forfait (forfeit). Happily for bankers, it is all negotiable: the better connected your tax lawyer is with the local canton official, the better your deal. The Swiss are famously good at keeping financial secrets, so there is no published list of which canton charges what, but the going rate in Geneva, the most expensive one, is about £180,000 a year. It sounds a lot, but it is much less than you would pay in London. The most popular cantons for rich Brits are Geneva, Vaud and the Valais, because they negotiate favourable forfeits and the locals speak French. In the Swiss-German part of Switzerland, Schaffhausen and Zug are very popular.
Another option is to become a resident, which is fairly simple as long as you are rich and from America or the EU, then pay tax at the local rates, which are linked to the value of property and are typically only 20% of income. When you are sitting on as much money as James, the tax deal feels as invigorating as the mountain air.
It needs to, because Switzerland is Dullsville. Even Geneva (population smaller than York’s) feels provincial. The old town is attractive: grand avenues and tall, flat-fronted stone buildings. On the evening I arrive, it is full of people dressed like d’Artagnan, drinking vin chaud and eating marzipan vegetables to celebrate Escalade (the defeat of the Duke of Savoy, who attacked the city in 1602). Even so, it seems quiet. There are hardly any normal shops: most seem to sell only diamonds and furs (presents for the mistress after a visit to the private bank).
A lawyer I met in Geneva told me he drives to France to go to the supermarket. I don’t blame him; Swiss prices certainly favour the super-rich. I took James and his girlfriend out for supper at a studenty restaurant where they serve only steak and chips: £150 for three, excluding service. The other downside is that everyone looks the same: flat boots, jeans, tasteful warm coats. After London, Geneva feels grey and middle-aged. But it is safe — you can carry around wads of 1,000 (£600) Swiss franc notes and not worry.
I always thought that the best part about being really rich would be that you could live the life you always wanted. So, do you dream of Switzerland? Fiona, a friend who grew up in Zurich, says: “There seems to be a giant megaphone in Switzerland which at 9pm shouts ‘Go to bed’. Nothing happens. It’s the most boring place on earth.”
Switzerland is also the nearest democracy to a police state; life is unbelievably regulated. “When you buy a house, you sign up to the règlements of the commune,” explained Matthew Parish, of Hogan & Hartson solicitors, in his swanky offices in Geneva’s old town. “These specify everything from where and when you can hang out your washing to the exact colour of the flowers in the window boxes of the whole village.” Parish liked his village — “less than 20 minutes to the centre of Geneva by car and no traffic” — and felt pretty sanguine about the petty rules. I was aghast.
Another long-term resident was less happy: he had sat for 10 minutes in his car one evening listening to the end of a World Service programme. The next morning he had a note from the commune telling him he had broken the rules and it must not happen again. On another occasion he left his car — legally — in a car park when he went on holiday; on his return he was visited by Interpol and asked why he had not moved it.
There is no bending the rules. If you default on your mortgage, you will be put in jail. No wonder everyone looks the same. The place is set up to be as homogenous as possible. It makes you long for some spark of individuality. But the rich, of course, are different. They’re rich. And they get that way by caring a good deal about money: making it, multiplying it, hanging onto it and giving as little as possible to the taxman. All over Switzerland is a particular advert showing a smug man with a very swanky watch and his son: “You never own a Patek Philippe, you merely look after it for the next generation.” Switzerland is all about hanging on to the dosh for the next generation.
James, not surprisingly, is very enthusiastic about the country. “It’s fantastic. It’s never had a king or queen, so there is no aristocracy. It was originally three cantons, which in 1291 rebelled against the Austrian princes, who were demanding too much tax. They fought for independence and have remained a self-governing federation ever since.”
Switzerland is also enormously stable: 100-year mortgages are common, property is a safe investment, and the average income is $68,000, against $44,000 in the UK. The Swiss are unlikely to bring in the kind of arbitrary tax changes that have made London’s bankers so jumpy.
It may be politically popular to tax the bankers — Labour earned a rare lift in the polls when the bonus levy was announced — but the government estimates that the top 1% of all taxpayers (many of whom work in finance) will pay 24% of all income tax in 2009-10. The top 5% pay 43% of the total. Tempting though it is to tax the rich as a way of blaming bankers for the crisis (which has cost every British family £12,000), most of them are super-mobile and don’t have to be here. Alienating them means losing the fiscal manna they bring in taxes. And with the budget deficit at a record high, we need all the revenues we can get.
Of course there is some special pleading by the bankers in all this. But just because they are squealing doesn’t mean that London as a financial centre is not under threat. A recent poll of Bloomberg subscribers found Britain had dropped behind Singapore into third place as the city most likely to be the best financial hub two years from now; and a survey of executives found that Shanghai could overtake London within 10 years.
The change in the financial weather in London is not just talk. Several big British-based hedge funds have already moved, including Jabre Capital, while Blue Crest and Bevan Howard are moving substantial numbers of staff to Geneva. I went to visit another hedge fund, Amplitude Capital, whose chairman, Karsten Schroeder, 34, last year shifted all his employees from Mayfair to the canton of Zug (corporation tax as low as 12%).
Zug is 35 minutes from Zurich by train and three hours from Geneva, but feels much more foreign. The Swiss-Germans are not friendly and the language is impenetrable. When I alight in Zug it is -9C. Mist hangs over the lake, and the mountains loom intermittently through the gloom. The industrial estate where Schroeder’s offices are is still being built. It would be hard to imagine anywhere less like London. Shivering in my taxi, surrounded by ugly concrete, I feel a real longing for such Mayfair landmarks as Fortnum’s, the Royal Academy and Burlington Arcade.
The German-born Schroeder is obviously made of sterner stuff. Drawn to the City in its heyday five years ago, he couldn’t wait to leave. “London is expensive and dirty,” he says. “Everything was terrible — trains, airports, water, roads. The service was bad in shops and restaurants. It was all ‘We appreciate your concern but we couldn’t care f***ing less.’”
Then he brags: “In Mayfair I had 50 square metres; in Zug I have 500 and I pay the same price.” His office is certainly palatial — a vast glass-and-steel expanse. In the loo is an orchid. In the atrium, a harp. Does he play? “Do I look like the kind of man who plays the harp?” he snaps. Actually, he does: hairless and antiseptic, he looks more harpist than action man (though he pulls on a red Formula One jacket to drive me to the station in his top-of-the-range white Mercedes and can’t stop telling me how “outdoorsy” he is).
So why did he move his hedge fund? The last straw, he says, was when he was travelling back with his skis and a London cab driver refused to take them: “‘Can’t. It’s in my terms and conditions. I don’t have to take them if I don’t want to.’ I just thought, that’s it. I’ve had enough of London.”
There may have been other reasons, too. David Butler, from Kinetic, the firm that helped Schroeder move to Zug, says pending regulations, and taxes rising to 50%, have started an exodus. The only reason Butler has not moved already himself, he says in his posh offices high above the City, is that his Russian wife likes Highgate.
Schroeder has no wife to veto the move. “I didn’t really warm to London,” he says. “We are a systematic [computerised] fund and we have huge servers, so lots of space makes it easier. In London we were always having hassles with landlords.” He employs mathematicians and physicists, of which Zurich University has a rich supply.
Echoing James, who is furious that the foreign bankers he worked with could settle in Britain without paying any tax under our non-domiciled rules, Schroeder says: “It always seemed unfair that foreigners paid so much less tax than the average Brit. I’m not surprised the government is raising the top rates and cracking down on non-doms.” From the end of January non-doms will pay a £30,000 flat rate. And after April the annual tax and National Insurance bill for a Brit earning £500,000 will rise from under £200,000 to more than £235,000.
Why did Schroeder choose Zug? “It wasn’t just a tax thing — Malta, the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands have lower taxes, but they are too remote and difficult from a business perspective. Singapore or Hong Kong could be good, but the air quality is bad and they’re a long way from Europe. Switzerland is the perfect combination of lifestyle and regulatory environment.”
For him Britain’s problems are far more deep-seated than the tax regime or the infrastructure. “Britain is too dependent on the financial sector. France and Germany at least still make things; you don’t. You have a big problem — you should be investing in education and infrastructure and changing the basis of the economy.”
Our immigration policy arouses his particular ire: he says it is so out of control that the country is buckling under the strain. “In Switzerland all immigrants become part of the community, get good jobs.” With minimal crime and a high standard of living (he pays his cleaner 40 Swiss francs an hour — £24 pounds — against £9 in London), it is a better society. “Here you see children of six or seven walking to school alone. It’s more old-fashioned. It’s a calm, peaceful life.”
Schroeder says Zug reminds him of the places where he was brought up in rural Germany. But he admits that not all his British employees like the place: “Some have gone back. If you are 22, you might wonder what on earth you are doing here.”
For most Brits, Switzerland is synonymous with Zermatt, Gstaad, St Moritz. The very names are shorthand for luxury, money and glitz, and it is to these resorts that many City types who have made their pile are moving. They are certainly more appealing than Geneva or Zug. Brothers Charlie and Simon Jackson from Somerset spent much of their childhood in Crans Montana. Crans is less well known than other ski centres, but that is because, as Charlie puts it, “Wealth whispers. Crans has always been more discreet.” The actor Roger Moore, the head of Carrefour supermarkets (the French Tesco) and several British aristos have chalets here.
The Jacksons are chalet whisperers. Swisch, their company, sells extremely upmarket property to seriously rich City types. They run the kind of bespoke service you can only imagine if you are the type who keeps a Porsche Cayenne in your garage just waiting for you and your mink-lined moon boots. Think deerskin cupboards with antler handles, cookers so high-tech they don’t turn on until you put a little butter in the pan, humidors for £5,000. Prices start at a million Swiss francs (£600,000). If you need to ask, you can’t afford it.
“We’ve seen a real change in how people are buying,” says Charlie. “Before, they would buy an apartment to use for skiing and perhaps come out once in the summer. But we now have four British clients, including a hedge-funder, looking to live out here most of the time. They want to become resident in Switzerland — for tax purposes, sure, but also because they’ve had enough of England.”
Crans, like Verbier and Zermatt, where the Jacksons also operate, is in the Valais canton (a good one when it comes to negotiating tax forfeits) and is near the Italian border, where people are more relaxed. Charlie lived last year in Crans, putting his three small children into the local school, “where they learnt mostly skiing and maths” (how Swiss). “Here they don’t have any of those rules about children that make English life so oppressive. I was entrusted with a group of five-year-olds from my child’s class. I took them up the mountain and skied down. It’s much more old-fashioned, and children respect adults more.”
Crans is a good place to relocate because it’s almost as busy in summer as in winter, thanks to its world championship golf course. It is also popular with Italians, so the coffee is excellent, as is the shopping — Chanel, Hermès, Vuitton. Charlie’s younger brother, Simon, a fixture on the Verbier party scene and a real charmer, says: “We often get two or three families who decide to buy here together and holiday together. Otherwise it can get lonely. You won’t be making Swiss friends, especially in a resort.”
The Swiss may allow rich foreigners to settle, but they do not take them to their hearts. “It’s an expat life,” explained Elizabeth Gregory, 26, who left her job as a trader at Morgan Stanley to work for Advanced Currency Markets SA, a Geneva online trading-services company. Her headline salary is lower than in the City, but “I am £1,000 a month better off”. She needs to be. A room in a shared house, “which I was amazingly lucky to get”, costs her 3,000 Swiss francs a month.
“There isn’t a great deal to do here,” she admits with a smile. The only thing open on a Sunday is her gym; she misses London nightlife and her friends, but she is learning French and intends to live in several countries before retiring at 35. (Wow, these bankers make you feel old.) She goes home to London most weekends.
Might her London banking friends follow her out here? “Sure, why not?” she says, sipping white wine. “They’re all pretty pissed off at the tax on bonuses and the new top rate of 50%. People like me, we’re motivated by money. If you take so much away in tax, there’s no incentive.”
Just look at the tax on a bonus of £200,000. First, there is the new bonus tax of 50%, which costs the company another £87,500. Then there is employer’s National Insurance of £25,600. Then the employee pays income tax at 40% on the £200,000, which is £80,000, and employee’s NI, another £2,000. So the total tax is a whopping £195,100. This represents a 98% tax burden on the net payment of £200,000 to the employee.
One old City hand said: “There’s a parallel with when the Eurodollar market was setting up in Paris in the 1970s and the French slapped a tax on it. By contrast, the Bank of England said we won’t do that, come over here, and the French and the Americans all did, which was the start of London’s pre-eminence as a financial centre. I get a strong feeling of desperation in the City now.”
The fear for the British Treasury is that a big international investment bank might relocate. So far, that has not happened. But Bob Diamond of Barclays Capital, one of Britain’s highest-paid bankers, warned last month: “Both financial capital and human capital are extremely mobile.”
Relocating to Switzerland is by no means a golden bullet, however. Geneva is full to bursting. Manpreet Dhami-Magne is regional director for Emigra Europe, which helps companies relocate. We talk in a pretty cafe over hot chocolate. She tells me the international schools are badly oversubscribed and, echoing Gregory, that it is very hard to find accommodation, particularly in Geneva. A banker’s wife moaned that “a perfectly ordinary family house in Geneva costs £9m”.
More worrying were Manpreet’s comments about Swiss society. She is Asian, from Birmingham, and is married to a Frenchman. She found it impossible to get an apartment because of her Asian name until she went to meet the estate agent with her white husband. “The Swiss are quite racist,” she says. “Rich white foreigners fit in fine, but I had an Asian friend who was stopped every time he came into Switzerland from France.”
Getting non-white and non-European technical staff into the country, and finding them somewhere to live, is “a challenge”, she says. Maybe that is why no major bank has yet moved.
En route to the airport on my way home, my taxi driver slammed on his brakes. We just — and I mean just — missed crashing into an old man on a crossing. “Gosh, that was close,” I said, somewhat shaken.
“Yes, that would have cost me 140 Swiss francs if I’d hit him,” the driver replied.
Hello? He’d nearly killed someone. I couldn’t believe money was the first thing he mentioned.
In Switzerland money talks. But that doesn’t mean it has anything to say.
taxes
Monday, January 11, 2010
Obama and Guantanamo
He ain't doing well in closing the place!
All we hear is how the bad guys are coming to American prisons, but that is not entirely true. Some ... no one wants. Obama has tried to force Switzerland to take a few ... just a few, and China has warned Switzerland that it should refuse the demand by Obama. China has told Switzerland that is should not accept TWO Uighur Guantanamo inmates because they would be a threat to Switzerland.
The One is having problems getting anyone to cooperate.
terrorism
All we hear is how the bad guys are coming to American prisons, but that is not entirely true. Some ... no one wants. Obama has tried to force Switzerland to take a few ... just a few, and China has warned Switzerland that it should refuse the demand by Obama. China has told Switzerland that is should not accept TWO Uighur Guantanamo inmates because they would be a threat to Switzerland.
The One is having problems getting anyone to cooperate.
terrorism
Monday, November 30, 2009
STOP. No Minarets. Swizterland says NO to political Islamization.
Swiss voters back ban on minarets in referendum
In what is being called 'huge surprise,' about 57.5% of citizens accept far-right call to oppose 'Islamization of Switzerland'. Result certain to embarrass country's neutral government
YNetnews
Reuters
11.29.09,
Israel News
Swiss voters approved a ban on construction of new minarets on Sunday, a surprise result certain to embarrass Switzerland's neutral government.
The Swiss news agency ATS and other media said about 57.5% of voters and all but four of the 26 cantons approved the proposal in the nationwide referendum, which was backed by the right-wing Swiss People's Party (SVP).
The government and parliament had rejected the initiative as violating the Swiss constitution, freedom of religion and the country's cherished tradition of tolerance. The government had said a ban could "serve the interests of extremist circles".
The United Nations human rights watchdog also voiced concern.
The government said it would respect the people's decision and declared construction of new minarets would no longer be permitted.
"Muslims in Switzerland are able to practice their religion alone or in community with others and live according to their beliefs just as before," it said in a statement.
Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf said the outcome of the vote reflected a fear of Islamic fundamentalism, but the ban was "not a feasible means of countering extremist tendencies".
A group of politicians from the SVP, the country's biggest party, and the Federal Democratic Union gathered enough signatures to force the referendum on the initiative which opposes the "Islamization of Switzerland".
Its campaign poster showed the Swiss flag covered in missile-like minarets and the portrait of a woman covered with a black chador and veil associated with strict Islam.
"We're enormously happy. It is a victory for this people, this Switzerland, this freedom and those who want a democratic society," Walter Wobmann, president of the initiative committee, said in a victory speech in the town of Egerkingen near Berne.
Earlier, Wobmann told Reuters: "We just want to stop further Islamization in Switzerland, I mean political Islam. People may practice their religion, that is no problem."
"We want to stop the further developments -- minarets ... Sharia law," the SVP parliamentarian said. "The minaret is the power symbol of political Islam and Sharia law."
Call to prayer banned
The Alpine country of nearly 7 million people is home to more than 300,000 Muslims, mainly from Bosnia, Kosovo and Turkey.
Four mosques among the country's estimated 130 to 160 Muslim cultural and prayer centers, have minarets, including those in Geneva and Zurich. The call to prayer is banned in the country.
The result is likely to strengthen the hand of the SVP, which has been accused of racism for its anti-immigration campaigns, including a poster showing white sheep kicking a black sheep off a Swiss flag.
"Today the SVP has to take responsibility for this provocation and assume the consequences. We are the only Western country to inscribe into our constitution a ban on the construction of minarets," Ada Marra, a Social Democrat parliamentarian from Vaud canton, said on Swiss television.
Wobmann, asked whether the anti-minaret result would damage Switzerland's image and huge financial industry whose clients include wealthy Arab clients in the Middle East, replied:
"No, there is no link between the two. It's not a restriction on Islam. We can't trade a democratic decision for money. That would be absurd - prostitution!"
In Geneva, home to UN humanitarian agencies, voters appeared to have rejected the initiative by nearly 60%.
A Geneva voter, Antonio Spagnolo, told Reuters television as he left the polling station: "I'm shocked ... I'm against this initiative because I think it's intolerance."
Islamization
In what is being called 'huge surprise,' about 57.5% of citizens accept far-right call to oppose 'Islamization of Switzerland'. Result certain to embarrass country's neutral government
YNetnews
Reuters
11.29.09,
Israel News
Swiss voters approved a ban on construction of new minarets on Sunday, a surprise result certain to embarrass Switzerland's neutral government.
The Swiss news agency ATS and other media said about 57.5% of voters and all but four of the 26 cantons approved the proposal in the nationwide referendum, which was backed by the right-wing Swiss People's Party (SVP).
The government and parliament had rejected the initiative as violating the Swiss constitution, freedom of religion and the country's cherished tradition of tolerance. The government had said a ban could "serve the interests of extremist circles".
The United Nations human rights watchdog also voiced concern.
The government said it would respect the people's decision and declared construction of new minarets would no longer be permitted.
"Muslims in Switzerland are able to practice their religion alone or in community with others and live according to their beliefs just as before," it said in a statement.
Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf said the outcome of the vote reflected a fear of Islamic fundamentalism, but the ban was "not a feasible means of countering extremist tendencies".
A group of politicians from the SVP, the country's biggest party, and the Federal Democratic Union gathered enough signatures to force the referendum on the initiative which opposes the "Islamization of Switzerland".
Its campaign poster showed the Swiss flag covered in missile-like minarets and the portrait of a woman covered with a black chador and veil associated with strict Islam.
"We're enormously happy. It is a victory for this people, this Switzerland, this freedom and those who want a democratic society," Walter Wobmann, president of the initiative committee, said in a victory speech in the town of Egerkingen near Berne.
Earlier, Wobmann told Reuters: "We just want to stop further Islamization in Switzerland, I mean political Islam. People may practice their religion, that is no problem."
"We want to stop the further developments -- minarets ... Sharia law," the SVP parliamentarian said. "The minaret is the power symbol of political Islam and Sharia law."
Call to prayer banned
The Alpine country of nearly 7 million people is home to more than 300,000 Muslims, mainly from Bosnia, Kosovo and Turkey.
Four mosques among the country's estimated 130 to 160 Muslim cultural and prayer centers, have minarets, including those in Geneva and Zurich. The call to prayer is banned in the country.
The result is likely to strengthen the hand of the SVP, which has been accused of racism for its anti-immigration campaigns, including a poster showing white sheep kicking a black sheep off a Swiss flag.
"Today the SVP has to take responsibility for this provocation and assume the consequences. We are the only Western country to inscribe into our constitution a ban on the construction of minarets," Ada Marra, a Social Democrat parliamentarian from Vaud canton, said on Swiss television.
Wobmann, asked whether the anti-minaret result would damage Switzerland's image and huge financial industry whose clients include wealthy Arab clients in the Middle East, replied:
"No, there is no link between the two. It's not a restriction on Islam. We can't trade a democratic decision for money. That would be absurd - prostitution!"
In Geneva, home to UN humanitarian agencies, voters appeared to have rejected the initiative by nearly 60%.
A Geneva voter, Antonio Spagnolo, told Reuters television as he left the polling station: "I'm shocked ... I'm against this initiative because I think it's intolerance."
Islamization
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Switzerland: Break our laws, just make sure you pay us and we'll apologize.
Thank God it didn't happen in the US, or Obama would have done a lot more than apologize.
Swiss president apologises over Kadhafi son's arrest
by Imed Lamloum
August 20, 2009
Hannibal Kadhafi and his pregnant wife were arrested in a luxury Geneva hotel on July 15, 2008 after two servants claimed they had been mistreated.
The couple were freed after two days in custody on bail of 500,000 Swiss francs (312,500 euros, 444,000 dollars).
The complaint was dropped after a lawyer for their servants -- a Moroccan and an Tunisian -- said they had received compensation.
[This statement and the dropping of the lawsuit does not in any way address the complaint, simply that they were paid off. The Swiss are apologizing for a criminal act that did occur, but they want the money more than they care about the law.]
In October, Libya responded by suspending oil deliveries to Switzerland, withdrawing assets worth an estimated five billion euros from Swiss banks, ending bilateral cooperation programmes and placing restrictions on Swiss companies.
Two Swiss businessmen in Libya were also banned from leaving the country.
Merz said in response to a question that "the Libyans have assured me that they will be allowed to leave before September 1."
"Today I have fulfilled my mission and achieved my goals of wiping the slate clean of last year's incident and opening the Libyan market" to Swiss firms once again, Merz said after more than a year of strained relations.
"It is a satisfying outcome for me."
The Swiss president also had talks in Tripoli with Foreign Minister Mussa Kussa, a Libyan government official said earlier.
Mahmudi said Libya and Switzerland would set up a joint committee to examine what he called the "tragic incident" in Geneva.
"Today we have been able to take a first step towards solving this problem. Switzerland has presented its official and solemn apologies concerning the unjust arrest of the son" of Kadhafi, the Libyan premier said.
Last month Swiss Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey said her country was trying to organise a meeting between Merz and the Libyan leader to defuse the crisis.
For Switzerland the dispute is "a matter of law, while for Libya it is a matter of honour," she said.
The authorities in Tripoli had sought an apology over the so-called "Hannibal affair," and had also unsuccessfully asked for the people responsible for the arrest of the Kadhafis to be punished.
[The son had to get going - he had to take the killer of over 250 people home to Libya. He is a busy guy.]
Libya
Swiss president apologises over Kadhafi son's arrest
by Imed Lamloum
August 20, 2009
Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz apologised to the Libyan people on Thursday over the arrest in Geneva a year ago of a son of Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi.
"I express to the Libyan people my apologies for the unjust arrest of a Libyan diplomat by Geneva police," Merz said at a joint news conference in Tripoli with Libyan Prime Minister Baghdadi Mahmudi.Hannibal Kadhafi and his pregnant wife were arrested in a luxury Geneva hotel on July 15, 2008 after two servants claimed they had been mistreated.
The couple were freed after two days in custody on bail of 500,000 Swiss francs (312,500 euros, 444,000 dollars).
The complaint was dropped after a lawyer for their servants -- a Moroccan and an Tunisian -- said they had received compensation.
[This statement and the dropping of the lawsuit does not in any way address the complaint, simply that they were paid off. The Swiss are apologizing for a criminal act that did occur, but they want the money more than they care about the law.]
In October, Libya responded by suspending oil deliveries to Switzerland, withdrawing assets worth an estimated five billion euros from Swiss banks, ending bilateral cooperation programmes and placing restrictions on Swiss companies.
Two Swiss businessmen in Libya were also banned from leaving the country.
Merz said in response to a question that "the Libyans have assured me that they will be allowed to leave before September 1."
"Today I have fulfilled my mission and achieved my goals of wiping the slate clean of last year's incident and opening the Libyan market" to Swiss firms once again, Merz said after more than a year of strained relations.
"It is a satisfying outcome for me."
The Swiss president also had talks in Tripoli with Foreign Minister Mussa Kussa, a Libyan government official said earlier.
Mahmudi said Libya and Switzerland would set up a joint committee to examine what he called the "tragic incident" in Geneva.
"Today we have been able to take a first step towards solving this problem. Switzerland has presented its official and solemn apologies concerning the unjust arrest of the son" of Kadhafi, the Libyan premier said.
Last month Swiss Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey said her country was trying to organise a meeting between Merz and the Libyan leader to defuse the crisis.
For Switzerland the dispute is "a matter of law, while for Libya it is a matter of honour," she said.
The authorities in Tripoli had sought an apology over the so-called "Hannibal affair," and had also unsuccessfully asked for the people responsible for the arrest of the Kadhafis to be punished.
[The son had to get going - he had to take the killer of over 250 people home to Libya. He is a busy guy.]
Libya
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