Ultra-wealthy recreational hunter convicted of tax fraud
The Tyrolean hunting lodge of Novartis CEO Daniel Vasella was destroyed in an arson attack on an August night in 2009.
Hunting villa and 4’000 hectares of hunting grounds
The Tyrolean hunting villa was located in the municipality of Bach in the Lechtal valley. According to «NZZ online», the house contained, among other things, cold storage rooms, magazines for storing hunting trophies, and garages. Vasella held the lease on a hunting ground of 4’000 hectares.
When the Graubünden native Daniel Vasella stepped down as Chairman of the Board of Novartis in February 2013, he was set to receive a remuneration of 72 million francs. According to estimates, he is said to have earned around 400 million francs at the Basel-based pharmaceutical company since 2000.
Court proves tax tricks
As the SonntagsZeitung reports, the recreational hunter claimed that he had emigrated to Monaco in 2013. There is no income or wealth tax there.
However, the Zug Administrative Court demonstrated in meticulous detail in a 57-page ruling that his evidence was false or implausible in numerous respects. His water consumption in Risch was 32 times higher than in Monaco. Of 160 flights between 2013 and 2015, only a single one departed from Nice. Otherwise, almost always from Zurich.
It is particularly with recreational hunting and recreational hunters that it is essential to look very closely. Nowhere is there more manipulation through falsehoods and fake news. More on the topic of crime and hunting.
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More on the subject of recreational hunting: In the dossier Poaching and hunting crime in Switzerland we document cases, legal questions and recurring patterns. What the research says about this is shown by Hunting fact-checked: the state of research.
The position of IG Wild beim Wild: IG Wild beim Wild rejects recreational hunting. Our model is the canton of Geneva, which has managed without recreational hunting since 1974: without hunting seasons, without hunting dogs, without driven hunts, without high seats, without the animal cruelty and crime that go hand in hand with hunting season elsewhere. What has worked there for over fifty years disproves every position paper by JagdSchweiz. An association that bases its policy on claims it refutes in its own documents is not a professional organisation, but a factory for misinformation.
