Word: switzerland
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...PARTING BLOT (01/20/01): On his final morning in the White House, President Clinton grants 140 presidential pardons and 36 commutations. Marc Rich, who has been living as a fugitive in Switzerland since his 1983 indictment on tax evasion and fraud, is among those receiving pardons. The voluminous list also names several other controversial figures, including convicted drug trafficker Carlos Vignali and notorious snake oil salesman Glenn Braswell...
...with the city's blue bloods. A snooty Manhattan philanthropist suggested at a dinner party last week that it is the Clintons themselves who should be pardoned: "They are, after all, so unsophisticated. They are from Arkansas. They don't know about people who go to Switzerland." But the money-media-fashion-fame crowd that makes up Manhattan's most interesting social set--a highly mobile, mutually exploitative crowd for which it's better to be interesting than good--will welcome him regardless. Whatever else he may be, he's not boring. "Washington is pretty provincial," says Paul Wilmot...
Before the pardon, Rich appeared to have it all--a mansion in a Swiss village, a global business and a helicopter to take him skiing where no lift could reach. But if he left Switzerland, Israel or Spain, he risked getting bounced to New York to face criminal tax-evasion charges from 1983. Bounty hunters and U.S. Marshals set traps for him, and Rich missed his father's funeral--and later his daughter's when she died of leukemia in 1996. That's why, for the two decades after he fled the U.S., Rich has been trying...
...Switzerland, meanwhile, Rich has contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to the economy through taxes and donations. "His donations are strategically focused," says Josef Lang, a Swiss historian and government official in Zug. "He knows exactly what segment of the population to attract: concerts and museums for educated, high-income people, the hockey club for 'popular' appeal." All the while, Switzerland refused to hand Rich over to the U.S. Says Hans Bachmann, the mayor of Meggen, where Rich lives: "He has not demanded any special treatment from local authorities, and we in turn do not talk about...
...price he's paid and why he inspires so much disgust. As for newly freed billionaire Rich, he would be well advised to hold off on his long-awaited dream to stroll down Fifth Avenue and "wave to his friends"; he should sit tight in his luxurious fortress in Switzerland. REED BIRNEY New York City...