Switzerland fights back tax haven slurs

Switzerland fights back tax haven slurs — with half-naked farmers

Roger Boyes

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/worl...amp;attr=797093

Switzerland, fed up with being portrayed as a tax-dodgers’ paradise, is rebranding itself as a land of hunky half-naked peasants with waxed chests and tight leather shorts.

“We want to show Switzerland in its best light, the countryside and a bit of its culture,†says Tina Steinauer, who has been shooting the 2010 calendar for the Swiss farmers’ union at the village of Seegräben near Zurich.

The culture in this case centres mainly on skimpily clad male farmers holding hoes or throwing around bales of hay with what appear to be cowbells stuffed into their underwear. This is apparently known as lingerie farming and is said to be very popular in the Swiss Alps. The aim is to export the calendar and show first of all that Swiss farmers have moved on a bit since Heidi but also that Switzerland is not — or not just — a nation of greedy bankers.

The country has had a bad press recently, with Germany and the US criticising it for refusing to surrender the names of tax evasion suspects.

Relations with Berlin are particularly brittle. Peer Steinbrück, the German Finance Minister, stirred up sentiment in the Alps by saying that the Swiss were behaving like Red Indians — the old-fashioned word for Native Americans — in flight from the US Cavalry, a reference to the way that bankers have been resisting the opening of accounts. A Swiss deputy then compared Mr Steinbrück to a Nazi. The minister replied by apologising to Native Americans — they, at least, had no record of tax-dodging — but not to the Swiss.

This month Mr Steinbrück lumped Switzerland and other tax havens together with Ougadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. This mysterious but presumably humorously intended reference to a country that does not even figure on the OECD list of tax havens, made the Swiss boil with rage.

Indeed, they apparently got so hot under the collar that they took the collar off, and did not stop there.

Auditioning for the erotic farmers’ calendar is now down to the final two dozen. Hundreds applied and the atmosphere was said to resemble a television talent casting show, only with goats. When it is finally shot, it will be exported to Germany, where farmers tend to be fully clothed and grumpy about milk prices.

“We will have to make sure that the German Finance Ministry gets one,†a member of the Swiss Farmers’ Union said.