Tag Archives: Business

Lucerne, with its iconic Chapel Bridge, is a major tourist attraction for visitors who often don’t spend the night in the city. One of the most popular destinations in Switzerland is reviewing its tourism strategy and mulling introducing coach fees in a bid to curb traffic woes and other disruptions caused by the large number of tourists it welcomes. The vast majority of visitors to Lucerne, whose tally surpasses 9...

The Swiss Federal Court is based in Lausanne - Click to enlarge The Swiss Federal Court is to decide on Friday whether Swiss bank UBS should handover data on its French clients to Paris tax authorities as part of a crackdown on suspected tax evasion. The decision has been described as key for Swiss banking circles. In May 2016, the French tax authorities requested administrative assistance from the...

Clad in costumes or red and white, the colours of the Swiss flag, these amateur actors took part in a historical parade ahead of the Fête des Vignerons earlier this year in Vevey. - Click to enlarge The expatriate Swiss community has been attending the once-in-a-lifetime Fête des Vignerons, currently taking place on the shores of Lake Geneva. A delegation of Swiss citizens living across the world, including leading...

Tracks being cooled with water The hottest day of the year in Switzerland caused a headache for the Swiss Federal Railways. Track damage occurred on Wednesday in the Zurich Oberland, canton Aargau near Brugg and in the Geneva area. Railways spokesman Raffael Hirt confirmed that lines had been interrupted in Zurich between Pfäffikon and Wetzikon and in Aargau between Wildegg and Brugg. In Geneva the stretch between...

Tourists from Asia are still outnumbered by guests from Europe and the US despite a growing number of Chinese and Indian holiday makers in Switzerland. (Archive picture) The director of Switzerland’s tourism marketing company has dismissed criticism that the country is overrun by Asian tourists. Martin Nydegger said concerns by the local population about too many tourists should be taken seriously. But the perception of...

US Senator Rand Paul had managed to block the agreement for 10 years. The United States Senate on Wednesday ratified a double-taxation agreement (DTA) with Switzerland, ending years of stalemate. The agreement, which required two-thirds of votes, was accepted by a large majority, according to the US Senate websiteexternal link. This accord, designed to meet international standards on the exchange of bank data, had been...

Last year, average new car emissions reached 137.8 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre – while the national limit is 130g CO2/km. Despite an increase in the use of biofuels and electric vehicles, fuel-related carbon dioxide emissions remained unchanged in 2018 in the country. The stagnation was due to the increase in road traffic. Owing to a rise in the average number of kilometres Swiss residents travelled last year,...

Switzerland has the densest railway network in the world. The Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) is selling its old locomotives on the Internet. Control cars, rails, switches and a firefighting train with a CHF1 million ($1 million) price tag are among the vintage vehicles on sale. You will be hard pressed to find anything for less than CHF25,000 on SBBresale.ch, according to the Sunday editions of the German-language Blick...

The firms were swapping information on rates for years, COMCO said. The Swiss competition commission (COMCO) has fined eight car leasing firms a total of CHF30 million ($30.4 million) for having swapped information on rates. The fines were announced on Thursday and come after some years of regular and systematic information exchanges between the companies on interest rates, COMCO announcedexternal...

Presenting the new version of the CHF1,000 note, March 2019. The amount of Swiss CHF1,000 notes that are hoarded rather than being used in the economy for payments could be as high as 87%, a study by the Swiss National Bank (SNB) has shown. The reportexternal link, “Demand for Swiss banknotes: some new evidence”, estimates the volume of Swiss banknotes being stashed – rather than spent or invested – over the period...