Switzerland Today

Dear Swiss Abroad,

In today’s briefing from Bern, we have the emotional story of a woman born in Colombia who was adopted illegally in Switzerland at seven months old and who moved back to Colombia in her thirties. Not so much a Swiss Abroad as a Swiss Returning Home.

Plus, the chances of someone becoming the world’s first trillionaire – and all the latest from this year’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF), which got underway in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos today.

© Keystone / Gaetan Bally

In the news:  Let the WEF begin! Chinese Premier Li Qiang is in town, as is Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and hundreds of demonstrators. Delegations from Turkey and Russia, on the other hand, are not.

• China and Switzerland have signed a joint declaration agreeing to deepen their partnership after Premier Li Qiang met Swiss President Viola Amherd today (pictured). Li, the most senior Chinese official to visit Switzerland since President Xi Jinping’s visit in 2017, met Amherd in Bern ahead of the WEF.
• Around 350 demonstrators in Davos have called for climate justice, an end to the WEF and an end to the power of large corporations. They had previously blocked the road at Davos Laret causing a traffic jam of more than 18 kilometres.
• Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has reportedly asked his country’s officials to skip the World Economic Forum this week over its organisers’ stance on Israel’s war against Hamas.
• For its part, Russia has described Ukraine peace plan talks at the WEF as useless. These talks will not lead to any results because Russia is not there, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said today. “It’s just a matter of talking for the sake of talking,” he said. 
• In non-WEF news, the European Commission has classified Swiss data protection as equivalent to the EU General Data Protection Regulation. 

Keystone

The world could have its first trillionaire within a decade, anti-poverty organisation Oxfam International said today in its annual assessment of global inequalities timed as political and business elites gather in Davos.

Oxfam, which for years has been trying to highlight the growing disparities between the super-rich and the bulk of the global population during the WEF’s annual meeting, reckons the gap has been “supercharged”External link since the Covid pandemic.

The group said the fortunes of the five richest people – Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault and his family of luxury company LVMH, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Oracle founder Larry Ellison and investment guru Warren Buffett – have spiked by 114% in real terms since 2020, when the world was reeling from the pandemic.

Oxfam’s interim executive director said the report showed that the world was entering a “decade of division”. “We have the top five billionaires; they have doubled their wealth. On the other hand, almost five billion people have become poorer,” Amitabh Behar said in an interview in Davos.

If current trends continue, Oxfam predicts there will be a trillionaire – someone with a thousand billion dollars – within a decade, but poverty won’t be eradicated for another 229 years. If someone does reach that trillion-dollar milestone – and it could be someone not even on any list of richest people right now – they would have the same value as oil-rich Saudi Arabia.

John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil fame is widely considered to have become the world’s first billionaire in 1916. Currently, Musk is the richest man on the planet, with a personal fortune of just under $250 billion (CHF214 billion), according to Oxfam, which used figures from Forbes.

zVG

Born in Colombia, Nathalie Favre was adopted by Swiss parents when she was seven months old.

In search of her roots, she returned to her native country where she has now lived for almost five years. It was an important experience, but far from easy. My colleague Melanie Eichenberger spoke to Favre and tells her story in this article.