Should oligarchs be expropriated in order to finance the reconstruction of Ukraine with their confiscated funds? Should funds from the Russian state be confiscated and sent to the invaded country as reparations? This is being discussed internationally. Canada is already working on this project in concrete terms. And Switzerland?
Ignazio Cassis is currently setting up the hurdles: “The right to property is a valuable asset, it is part of the Human Rights Charter.”
The foreign minister is right: human rights also apply to Russian oligarchs who don’t give a damn about the human rights of others – unless those of their own kind.
In the “Neue Zürcher Zeitung” (“NZZ”) one reads the sympathetic explanation: “Wealthy people from countries like Russia have and have money managed in Switzerland because they believe that private property is protected differently in a constitutional state than in their home country will.”
It’s exactly the same – just a little different: the looters from Russia know the unjust regime in which they live and work inside out. Your fortune is its rotten fruit – a booty that must be brought to safety in western constitutional states.
After all, what oligarch in their right mind trusts the oligarch state of Russia? People know each other too well to feel safe, from the alcoholic Yeltsin to the butcher Putin.
In Switzerland, the rule of law is the rule of law is the rule of law. That’s how it should be, that’s how it has to be – for oligarchs too. However, this is only the legal side of the gold coin. The other side is the question of morality, which, however, can also be answered succinctly:
The unjust state is the unjust state is the unjust state – Russia!
Did Swiss bankers never think of this refrain when they smoothed and bundled oligarch money with greedy hands? They never asked themselves: Where do these huge sums come from? How were they earned? What entrepreneurial achievement is behind it?
Yes, such questions would have left you at a loss. And who likes to be at a loss? In the money business it is better to be unscrupulous. In other words, the opposite of what the rule of law in Switzerland should be: scrupulous, if not downright polite, especially when dealing with the financially powerful.
That is also correct. Because, according to the “NZZ”, the “representative of a larger Swiss private bank says”, it could be “the beginning of the end of the Swiss financial center” if the state seizes oligarch funds in favor of Ukraine.
At the end of the financial center, the state would be to blame.
May one ask, in an incendiary manner, why the money, which is as detrimental to the business climate of the financial center as the CO2 in the air we breathe, was able to receive asylum in Switzerland at all? Wouldn’t an environmentally friendly climate be more beneficial for the Swiss monetary economy? According to the motto: Money in Switzerland is clean money.
green money!
frank & free: Of innocence and guilt(07:43)