Blocher's U-turn from nationalism to stockholder (or national?) socialism
Federal Councillor Christoph Blocher is a fine strategist with a complete amnesia for his own entrepreneurial carreer. By attacking NOVARTIS CEO Daniel Vasella - in an interview with the Neue Zürcher Zeitung am Sonntag, February 25, 2007 - and presenting himself as an advocate for stockholder rights, he forgets how he himself did his tricks as a young poor farmer and son of a protestant clergyman to become first CEO of EMS Chemie, a fine-chemicals enterprise domciliated at Domat-Ems in the Canton of Grisons and then get complete control of what is now EMS-Chemie Holding and a vast financial empire which he handed over to his children when he was elected to the Swiss Federal Council. A fierce patriot with a perfect sensorium and rhetoric to allure the electorate from the extreme right , he uses his power as minister of justice to remodel the judicial system of Switzerland according to his own ideas, which always come as a surprise to those who do not know him. His newest U-turn, presented as an indirect critique of NOVARTIS boss Vasella, has been well designed to please the notoriously socalist electorate of the Canton of Basel-Stadt and to help his own Swiss People's Party (SVP) that has had a difficult stand in that tiny city-republic and headquarter of ROCHE and NOVARTIS so far.
It is far from certain if the notoriously minoritarian liberals will be able to stem the tide and prevent Blocher's party from sucking them up in the national parliamentary elections due in autumn 2007.
The fusion of nationalism and socialism, Blocher style, is well under way in Switzerland.
4 comments:
This does seem, if you forgive me for saying so, to be far fetched. To make it less political: At the amazingly succesful Roche all the top executives have contracts that expire after a year. Something, that looks perfectly plausible, given their substancial remuneration.
The honorary Chairman of both UBS and Novartis never made a secret out of his bewilderment of the objectively unjustified arrangement, at both the menioned firms.
... as far as the Libetals go: If they got cracking on an election campagne for the senate that can actually be referred to as such and if their three excellent candidates for the national assembly - Burckhardt, Cramer & Iselin - do the same, the Bâle Liberal President writes political history.
One should stop looking so much at other and far more at oneself!
Yours, a.
Thank you for commenting my post. You mention one subject that might be worth more in depth analysis: the differences in style and in corporate control between ROCHE, UBS and NOVARTIS. Yet I maintain my argument that there are some striking similarities in the entrepreneurial carreers of both the Federal Councillor and the CEO of NOVARTIS, with one important difference, the professional background: farming vs. medicine.
Pleasure. I would not want to object to that, nor did I mean to. ...
Apropos in-depth analysis: Was the real origin of CBs fortune - in excess of the relatively insignificant EMS - not the participation held by him in Pharma and BK Vision respectively. Both of which went through the roof thanks to an as vastly as anonymously investor financed holding held in Roche and SBG, back in the early 90's? And would rumors be unjust or even untrue, that behind all of this was in fact no other than the HBM? Until FH had consolidated his position at Roche, after the vitamins issue and MEs peculiar attack on the Roche family back in 2000?
Could it be, that CBs wealth (as mentioned: The share in excess of EMS, to which he obtained access through SBG) was and is a direct conseqeunce of what today could and probably awould be regarded as unethical, if not illegal, insider transactions?
these questions and allegations are a lot tougher than what I myself - given my modest knowledge background in the financial world - would have been able to imagine.
My conclusion: in a country proud of it's record in corruption on the state level, the private sector of which is dominated by a few global players, insider trading appears to be endemic. Novelist Paul Erdman spent a year in a Basel prison that has been converted into a hotel and a museum for musical instruments since, for having tried to participate in the game...
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