American Way

“The Americans dictate all the terms,” the anti-immigrant SVP said in a May 29 statement. “It can’t be that parliament in such an unclear situation is forced via a cloak-and-dagger operation to surrender” without knowing the key elements of the program, it said.

The Swiss government is “convinced this is a solution that gets us to the goal and makes it possible for us to get back some room to manoeuvre,” Finance Minister Eveline Widmer- Schlumpf said on May 29, adding that any terms -- such as potential fines -- are confidential. “We believe that parliament will judge this like we do -- that there is no other reasonable, constitutional solution.”

Widmer-Schlumpf’s confidence in lawmakers’ approval can be drawn from June 2010, when Swiss parliament approved a U.S. tax treaty for UBS, the country’s biggest bank, ending a dispute that threatened the business of the bank, which two years before had been bailed out by the Swiss government.

More Palatable

The agreement’s signoff in parliament came after weeks of wrangling, in which lawmakers dropped a demand for it be put up for a nationwide referendum. At that time, both the SVP and the SP initially voiced opposition to the measure. The SVP then reversed course, saying the treaty was in the country’s higher interest.

In a bid to make the framework bill more palatable to parliamentarians, the finance ministry is planning to hold information sessions that will divulge details on what the banks may face, Der Bund newspaper reported on May 30, without saying where it got the information.

The CVP sounded optimistic on passing the law last week, saying that while they had not yet come to a final verdict they shared the view that “banks should solve the problems they caused themselves.”

Swiss lenders are in favor of the framework being approved. The chairman of Basler Kantonalbank, Andreas Albrecht, said the plan should go ahead, as did the head of the Swiss Banking Association, which has 350 members, including UBS and Credit Suisse.

“We have no choice,” SBA CEO Claude-Alain Margelisch told Neue Zuercher Zeitung. “We’d be in a situation in which we wouldn’t be able to solve the tax dispute.”