Word: swiss
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...judge from the reaction in Switzerland, complying with the demand would be like giving away the Alps. "We won?t allow ourselves to be crushed by the weight of the E.U.," says Hans Kaufmann, a former bank economist and the Swiss member of the parliament spearheading a move to add banking secrecy to the constitution as a fundamental right. The proposal by his Swiss People?s Party is now working its way through parliamentary committees, but already it has won significant support. Two cantons, Zurich and Aargau, have voted to back the initiative, and several other cantons are considering throwing...
...Swiss bank account no longer offers the ironclad protection it used to. Embarrassed by its image as the banker of choice for Third World tyrants and organized criminals, over the past decade Switzerland has introduced a raft of legislation designed to clean up its status as a financial haven, including anti-money-laundering laws that are among the toughest anywhere. The country now routinely cooperates in international criminal cases and has taken major steps after Sept. 11 to help track the financing of terrorism...
...issue Switzerland has remained unyielding: tax evasion by nonresidents. If a German dentist or a French entrepreneur has an account in Zurich or Geneva and doesn?t declare the interest back home, the Swiss say that?s not their problem. It?s an attitude that has long infuriated Switzerland?s neighbors. Now it is hurtling the country toward a head-on collision with the European Union that threatens to frustrate efforts to improve Switzerland?s international image?and could spell the end of its fabled banking secrecy once...
...after more than a decade of work, that aims to curb tax evasion through an exchange of tax information among member states. Prompted by Luxembourg and Austria?two tax havens within the E.U. that are particularly concerned about a flight of capital from their banks?Brussels is asking the Swiss to help out. It wants Switzerland, which is not an E.U. member, to automatically provide information to tax authorities about bank accounts held by E.U. residents...
...addicted to sleeping pills. His son is a pothead. The stepmother Mika (Isabelle Huppert) wanders about with a benign half-smile on her face, lacing the family's bedtime hot chocolate with a potent--and in her hands potentially lethal--soporific. The Swiss chateau is an unlikely stoner's paradise--and maybe, in Chabrol's mind, a metaphor for the way the bourgeois sleepwalk around their problems. Merci pour le Chocolat occasionally succumbs to Mika's legato rhythms, but it is more often a sly, subtle comedy about the oh-so-gentle art of murder. --By Richard Schickel