Swiss voters say no to spending gold money on world's poor
Sun Sep 22, 3:20 PM ET
By ALEXANDER G. HIGGINS, Associated Press Writer
GENEVA - Swiss voters Sunday killed a government plan to use billions of dollars worth of "excess" gold to help people in extreme need at home and abroad. The chief opponent said the plan was tainted by foreign blackmail.
The government proposal to set up a "solidarity foundation" lost by 52-48 percent, or 1,057,327 votes against to 984,590 in favor, according to final official returns. About 44.1 percent of eligible voters participated.
"The unspeakable Solidarity Foundation cannot be created," said nationalist politician Christoph Blocher. "The Swiss people cannot be blackmailed."
The plan was conceived in 1997 while Switzerland was being buffeted by allegations that it had misused its neutrality to profit from links to Nazi Germany during World War II.
President Kaspar Villiger said he "especially regretted" the vote, and added, "The allegation of blackmail isn't right."
The plan was to invest an expected 20 billion Swiss francs (dlrs 13.4 billion) from the sale of gold reserves and spend the interest through the foundation, with one-third going to the Swiss social security ( news - web sites) program, a third to regional governments and a third to people in need at home or abroad.
Blocher noted that the foundation originally was proposed by the government to aid Holocaust victims or anyone else suffering from genocide or disaster.
That was before pressure on Switzerland from abroad abated following the 1998 Swiss banks agreement to pay dlrs 1.25 billion in an out-of-court settlement with Holocaust victims and their heirs.
As the law to create the foundation worked its way through parliament, the purpose changed. All references to the Holocaust were removed. Compensation payments — to Nazi victims or any one else with a grievance against Switzerland — are excluded.
The government plan included dividing part of the money evenly between self-help projects for use at home and abroad to "continue the humanitarian tradition on which our country can rightly look back with pride."
But some critics said it would add little to what Switzerland is already doing in foreign aid.
"This foundation is a product of the blackmailing of our country by Jewish circles in the United States," Blocher, a billionaire industrialist and member of parliament, said in a recent interview with the daily Basler Zeitung.
Blocher led his Swiss People's Party in collecting the necessary amount of signatures under Swiss direct democracy to challenge the law.
But the process was already under way, and in May 2000 the central bank started selling off part of the national gold reserves.
The Swiss National Bank calculated that the precious metal's increase in value over the decades meant that it had twice as much gold as it needed to back the country's strong currency, the Swiss franc.
Some 1,300 tons is being sold off at the rate of about a ton a day, and the money has been piling up. The government hasn't disclosed the total proceeds from the nearly 600 tons sold so far, but at current gold prices it would be worth about 9.3 billion francs (dlrs 6.3 billion).
People have proposed using the money to pay off the national debt or to set up a national investment fund. Blocher's party proposed putting the money in Swiss social security. But that proposal also lost in Sunday's vote.
On a separate issue, voters rejected by 52.6-47.4 percent a plan to deregulate the distribution of electricity to give consumers more of a choice and to promote competition among providers.
Opponents claimed the plan would lead to power failures like those experienced in California.
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