All About Switzerland

By Clare O'Dea

An up-to-date guide to Swiss society and current affairs, All About Switzerland features a selection of 29 news and background articles, opinion pieces and personal essays by Clare O'Dea. The articles were first published online between 2022 and 2024 by The Local Switzerland news platform. 

Author of the bestselling

• Language: English
• Publisher: Clare O
• Release date: May 8, 2024
• ISBN: 9782839942652

Book preview

Introduction

Money

Five failings in Switzerland’s fight against money laundering

Why Switzerland needs to scrap its fabled 1,000-franc note

How to save money on healthcare in Switzerland

Switzerland’s richest are getting richer but is that what the country wants?

Switzerland and Europe

How likely is it that Switzerland will join the EU in the next decade?

The Swiss Cold War manual inspiring Ukraine’s fight against Russia

Switzerland’s neutrality not immune to impacts of Ukraine’s invasion

Foreigners

Switzerland’s denial of voting rights to foreigners is motivated by fear

Are foreigners to blame if they find the Swiss unfriendly?

What are the best Swiss cantons for foreigners to live in?

Seven tips on how to learn one of Switzerland’s national languages

The Future

Will Switzerland be able to feed itself in the future?

Nine million population threshold sparks soul-searching

An impossible dream: will we come to dread Swiss summers in future?

Are the Swiss finally going to get serious on tackling the climate crisis?

Women

Part-time work is a costly compromise for women in Switzerland

Switzerland can no longer justify a lower retirement age for women

Weighing up achievements since the 2019 women’s strike

Society

Switzerland has found a winning formula for its primary schools

Swiss trains are an expensive success story

Why so many Swiss are quitting the church and taking their money with them

Old bastions of privilege endure in Switzerland

Only in Switzerland

Signatures for cash cheapens Swiss democracy

Is the Swiss obsession with privacy too much of a good thing?

Job hunting tips: what Swiss employers are looking for

And finally…

Cleanliness is next to Swissness

How to make the most of the hectic Swiss summer

English-language bookshops have become a community haven

The true signs you’re becoming more Swiss than the Swiss

Key Swiss facts

About the author

About The Local

Introduction

Twenty-first century Switzerland is brimming with potential. In this small, rich, peaceful country of nine million inhabitants, the conditions exist to create a perfectly functioning society. The challenge is to find a common vision of what that might be and take the necessary steps to get there.

The country has succeeded on many levels, claiming the top spot in all kinds of global rankings, from health to prosperity to innovation. But there are still plenty of glitches in the system. The Swiss quest to do better is never-ending.

Over the past two years, I’ve been chronicling this process for The Local Switzerland, an online news platform. If you’d like a better understanding of daily life and current affairs in Switzerland, this is the book for you.

The Swiss Confederation is a diverse place with a high proportion of foreign residents. The four language groups – German, French, Italian and Romansh – each have their own variant of Swiss culture, but they are united by a federalist mindset and the Swiss principle of hands-on democracy.

To find out how they all work together, where they go right, and where they go wrong, let this selection of articles be your guide. Let’s begin with most the most important Swiss topic of all – money.

Clare O’Dea, May 2024

Note: the articles in this book were first published between 2022 and 2024 and have been lightly edited and updated where necessary. Updates are marked in italics.

MONEY

Five failings in Switzerland fight against money laundering

As one of the world’s largest offshore financial centres, Switzerland is a magnet for money laundering. Money is channelled in and out of the country at multiples of what would be the normal rate for the size of the economy.

In the ongoing Brazilian Petrobras/Odebrecht corruption scandal alone, Swiss prosecutors froze 1,000 accounts in 40 Swiss banks worth $1.1 billion. Seizing and returning illegal assets is something the Swiss do rather well, when asked.

But are the Swiss authorities doing everything in their power to deter economic criminals? It really doesn’t look that way. There are weaknesses all along the justice pipeline from parliament to prison, which add up to little meaningful punishment for wrongdoing.

The verdict? Could do better. Here are the five main failings in the Swiss fight against economic crime:

Weak laws: When Swiss parliament had the chance to close money laundering loopholes, it didn’t take it. A revision of the Anti-Money Laundering Act was approved by Swiss parliament in 2021. The revision was a lengthy process, and the government’s goal was to bring Swiss law into line with international practice.

However, parliamentarians watered down the government’s proposed changes to the act, crucially excluding lawyers and financial advisors from the due diligence requirements. The Financial Action Task Force (FAFT), an international watchdog, had been calling for this step since 2005.

Could the implacable resistance in Bern have anything to do with the fact that one in four members of parliament are qualified lawyers? Some Swiss media have raised the question.

Too slow: Complex international financial investigations take time. That’s understandable. The Petrobras affair has been under investigation by Swiss prosecutors since 2014, with one conviction so far in Switzerland. 

For the few financial fraud cases that finally come before the courts, there is often a ping-pong game of appeals back and forth. The result can be that justice delayed is justice denied.

François Pilet of Gotham City, a Swiss platform reporting on economic crime, tracks large and small cases on their tortuous journey through the Swiss courts. His conclusion: By exploiting the multiple possibilities for appeal at cantonal and federal level, it is possible to delay a case by around 10 years before an eventual conviction comes into effect.

Too soft: One of the main players responding to fraud in the Swiss financial sector is the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, Finma. As an enforcer, the authority is limited in how much pain it can inflict. It does not have the power to impose fines.

Finma oversees 29,000 institutions and products, including 17,700 financial intermediaries and 500 banks. Where Finma finds wrongdoing, its usual response is to name and shame, and restrict some activities. In some egregious cases, Finma has ordered assets to be forfeited, and imposed an external auditor. But mostly, the offending bank does not face life-changing measures. 

In November 2021, for example, Finma announced the conclusion of its investigation into banks connected to alleged cases of corruption linked to the Venezuelan oil company PDVSA.

After reviewing the activities of more than 30 banks, Finma found breaches of Swiss supervisory obligations in five cases. It ultimately opened enforcement proceedings against those five banks, including Julius Baer and Credit Suisse.

These proceedings amounted to recommendations, some restrictions of activities, obligations to report on progress, and some individual staff were banned from acting in a senior role. Just one institution, CBH Bank, was forced to terminate all remaining business relationships with Venezuelan clients. Julius Baer faced a one-year acquisition ban.

No jail time: In the rare cases where a court manages to convict an intermediary, the punishment is usually relatively meaningless – a suspended sentence. This is partly because the Swiss legal system does not have the same punishment ethos that is the norm in other countries.

Since 2007, all prison sentences under two years are automatically suspended. Because most sentences for fraud are under two years, it means people convicted of economic crimes, which may also ruin or cost lives, will never spend a day in prison.

At the most, they will have to pay back the money they have stolen, if they still have it. This soft approach is at odds with other European countries, which have become increasingly tough on white-collar crime.

Honour system: In the fight against money laundering, the Swiss system relies on the banks to follow due diligence rules to determine whether a given client’s assets are legal. Banks and financial intermediaries are meant to assess their own customers and report any suspicious activity to the Money Laundering Reporting Office (MROS).

But an oversight system based on self-regulation has obvious limitations. According to Public Eye, the friction between a bank’s legal duties and its drive to make profit is one of the main stumbling blocks in the Swiss supervisory system.

More often than not, banks end up responding to reports of suspicious assets that come from outside, rather than inhouse – chiefly uncovered by the media or prosecutors. By the time they act, the fraud has been long-running.

The final unseen and unspoken failing lies in the cultural legacy of banking secrecy. Part of Switzerland’s success story is the strength of its financial sector. Swiss politicians, banks, and to some extent, the public, share a sense that keeping financial matters confidential is not such a bad idea.

First published: 18.02.2022

Why Switzerland needs to scrap its fabled 1,000-franc note