Swiss Review 4/2018

16 Swiss Review / July 2018 / No.4 Economy YVONNE DEBRUNNER PostBus travels through mountain passes, providing transport to themost remote valleys and far-flung villages. It covers areas where bakers, butchers, village shops and, yes, even the Swiss Post Office have long since closed their doors. A bus, even if only every few hours, is part of universal service in Switzerland. The yellow postal buses are a symbol of public service. They connect towns and villages and, in a sense, hold the country together. The yellow gloss has nowbeen tar- nished. The drivers wearing light yel- low shirts no longer just have to ex- plain to passengers where to get off or change buses. They now have to tell themwhy their employer fraudulently obtained subsidies for many years. PostBus systematicallymovedmoney around using accounting tricks to make the subsidised bus routes seem less profitable than they really were. The upshot was that federal gov- ernment and the Swiss cantons paid excessively high subsidies for almost ten years, from 2007 to 2015. They handed over 92 million Swiss francs too much, according to Federal Office of Transport (FOT) calculations. The FOT has already demanded the repay- ment of some of that amount – 13.7 million – as part of a previous adjust- ment. PostBus wants to repay the rest of themoney, too. But the figure could yet rise. The FOT has revealed that PostBus also received undue subsidies in the post-2015 period, effectively right up to the present day. The only thing that has changed is the procedure. Swiss Post established a holding structure in 2016. The FOT criticised this move because it be- lieved the company’s units would charge each other inflated prices for reciprocal services.Was the intention simply to obtain subsidies by fraudu- lentmeans using a subtle trick? This is what the ongoing investigation aims to establish. Swiss Post repeats this sentence almost every day at the mo- ment. The current investigation is seeking to determine whether Su- sanne Ruoff, the Swiss Post CEO who resigned in June, and her predecessors turned a blind eye while millions of Swiss francs in public funding was fraudulently claimed. It is also looking into whether the dismissed PostBus CEO was sacrificed as a scapegoat. Fi- nally, it is seeking to find out why all of this happened at all. The motive in this case is the biggest mystery. PostBus ultimately deceived its own owner. The fraudulently ob- tained money stayed in the company. What lay behind it all? It is conceiva- ble that some of the PostBus manage- ment would have received higher bo- nuses for improving performance. The real reasonmay actually lie in the company’s bizarre dual role. Post- Bus travels from village to village and receives subsidies in return. But Post- Bus also takes tourist groups to Bur- gundy and Piedmont, has bus net- works in France and invests in Publibike, a bike hire scheme. The company does not receive subsidies for these activities. The aim here is profit rather thanmaking villages accessible. The dismissed PostBus CEO also pointed to a “conflict of interests”. Should transport from one village to the next be provided as cheaply as pos- sible to avoid causing unnecessary ex- pense to the taxpayer? Or should pub- lic money be claimedwhere it doesn’t really do any harm to expand and in- vest in order to achieve internal profit targets? The answer is obvious. Subsi- diesmust beminimised before profits can be maximised. However, operat- ing in that space between public ser- vice mandate andmarket orientation, as well as the organisational proxim- ity of these completely contrasting units, must have led to confusion in this regard. YVONNE DEBRUNNER IS ECONOMIC AFFAIRS EDITOR AT TAMEDIA Yellow gloss tarnished PostBus was an exemplary company. Then a subsidy scandal erupted which was unprecedented in Switzerland. The matter has still not been fully resolved. How did this situation arise? The scandal has tarnished PostBus’s gleaming image, and Swiss Post CEO Susanne Ruoff paid the price in June by resigning from her position. Images: Keystone