Tag Archives: 3) Swiss Markets and News

© Sergei Babenko | Dreamstime.com In 2016, the social security office in Zurich discovered a concealed bank account containing CHF 1 million belonging to a deceased man who had received welfare payments for 13 years, reported RTS. Over the 13 years, the man had received financial hardship payments, known as supplemental benefits, and health insurance subsidies amounting to CHF 140,000. When applying for hardship payments in Switzerland, all wealth must be declared....

The bank will face a trial over its role in Mozambique’s $2 billion (CHF1.8 billion) “tuna bonds” scandal, a fresh blow as it struggles to shake off a succession of crises that have plagued the group in recent years. The High Court judge presiding over a London lawsuit brought by creditors against Credit Suisse set a date last month of September 2023 for a 13-week trial, according to people familiar with the matter. The re-emergence of an eight-year-old scandal is a...

Respondents thought reducing driving was necessary – for other people Keystone / Urs Flueeler A majority (70%) of Swiss believe it’s important to avoid emissions in their everyday lives, although fewer are likely to back up their views with action, according to a survey. There were no significant differences between women and men, but the over-50 age group believed it was more important to avoid emissions than younger age groups, said a surveyExternal link by...

Almost 8% of Swiss residents over the age of 15 rode mountain bikes. Keystone / Laurent Gillieron Numbers engaging in outdoor activities like walking, cycling or mountain biking continued to rise in Switzerland in 2019, the Federal Office for Roads (ASTRA) has reported. This is also good news for the economy. Some 57% of Swiss residents labelled themselves as walkers in 2019, going on an average of 15 walks per year for an average of three hours each, ASTRA said in a...

Ralph Hamers took up the CEO post at Swiss bank UBS in 2020. Keystone / Walter Bieri “How can we [ . . .] fight increased inequality?” railed Ralph Hamers in a recent interview. To be clear, Hamers is not the boss of Unicef, or Oxfam or the Social Mobility Foundation. He is chief executive of Swiss bank UBS, one of the biggest beneficiaries of the widening wealth gap. UBS’s latest results quantified that benefit. Second-quarter net profit surged 63% to $2 billion...

The affair exploded in autumn 2019 when it emerged that Credit Suisse had private detectives tail Khan, a former head of wealth management who had left the bank for competitor UBS. © Keystone / Christian Beutler The Swiss bank and its former top manager Iqbal Khan have agreed to end all pending criminal proceedings in a 2019 spying affair that toppled the company’s top brass. Speaking to the Reuters news agency, a spokesperson for Credit Suisse confirmed a report in...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]The president of the national marketing body Switzerland Tourism says the year 2021 is on course to be even worse than 2020, with 5% fewer hotel stays expected. "This is not good news, because 2020 was the worst year in history" for the sector, Martin Nydegger told the newspaper SonntagsZeitung.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Switzerland’s four largest buildings insurers estimate the costs of recent weather events could reach half a billion francs across Switzerland, reported RTS. According to Grégoire Deiss, who works for the cantonal buildings insurer ECAB in Fribourg, the cost of recent storms and flooding could be around CHF 500 million across all of Switzerland, a figure he based on claims that have been made so far.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]The youth chapter of the PLR (FDP) has successfully collected enough signatures for an initiative to raise the official retirement age in Switzerland to 66 years old, reported RTS. On 16 July 2021, initiative organisers submitted 145,000 voter signatures as part of the formal process of launching a referendum in Switzerland.

Tangled in the cloud: a Federal court will now review the contract decision. © Keystone / Gaetan Bally Google has appealed a recent Swiss decision to award a cloud-computing contract to five other digital firms. The tender process has also come under criticism by defenders of data sovereignty. Google’s appeal targets the government’s decision last month to name US companies Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, and Chinese firm Alibaba, as winning candidates to create...