Hansjürg Saager

Hansjürg Saager (2017)

Hansjürg Saager (born March 15, 1940 in Zurich ; † July 18, 2017 in Chur ; entitled to live in Menziken and Küsnacht ) was a Swiss journalist , business journalist and publisher as well as an entrepreneur who worked primarily in the media, wine and raw materials industries as a Investor was active.

Life

Saager was the son of Bruno Max Saager (1908-1991), who in the fifties as Director General of SBG (now UBS) the gold business with South Africa built up and much of the settlement of the conflict between Switzerland and the United States around the controversial holding company Interhandel was involved, as Hansjürg Saager in the posthumously published biography Bruno Max Saager. Represents banking pioneer of the post-war period . He grew up in Höngg and Goldbach (Küsnacht) on Lake Zurich together with his brother Rudolf (* 1937) and was a keen scout in his youth . As a rower, he was a member of the Küsnacht sea club and the Swiss national rowing team. In 1962 he took part in the first rowing world championships in Lucerne in eighth position . In 1965 his team won the European student championships in Kiel . From 1981 to 1985 he was President of the Zurich Regatta Association. He later turned to skiing , mountain hiking and golf .

Saager completed the Matura type B at the Free Gymnasium in Zurich, attended the international Scottish private school Gordonstoun and studied law, economics and journalism at the universities of Zurich , Hamburg and Friborg .

In addition to his work as a media entrepreneur, Saager was a wine and raw material entrepreneur and ran the Eikendal winery near Stellenbosch in South Africa , which belongs to the family-owned Substantia AG for financing and investments, of which he was a member of the board of directors. Saager's father bought the winery in the 1980s to replace his coffee plantations in Tanzania , which had been nationalized . Until shortly before his death, Saager wrote weekly about raw materials for AWP and the Basler Zeitung .

At the age of 77, Saager died after a brief, serious illness.

career

After graduating in 1966, Saager worked for a year at the brokerage firm Williams de Broe in London. He then worked for AWP Finanznachrichten , initially as a freelancer and federal journalist for the news agency , which at the time was a company for business publications, and from 1969 as an employee. After the unexpected death of the company founder and owner, Walter von Känel, Saager took over the company and the operational management in 1972 and moved from Bern to Zurich.

In 1974 he signed a contract with Telekurs AG (now SIX Financial Information ) for the delivery of financial news, which formed the basis for further development. Together with his wife Franziska, he continuously built AWP into the leading financial news agency in Switzerland. In addition, there were other activities such as the development of the business databases Videodata and Teledata . Saager had been preparing his retirement from AWP a long time ago. Between 2000 and 2005, he gradually sold his shares to the Swiss Dispatch Agency (sda).

Saager was also committed to occupational pensions, the 2nd pillar of the three-pillar system for old-age provision in Switzerland. He was editor of the bimonthly magazine AWP Soziale Sicherheit and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the publishing company Atlas Service AG, a subsidiary of AWP Holding AG, and provided information on the topic of social security in numerous seminars.

At the end of 2005, Saager withdrew from the operational management of AWP. He took over the office of Chairman of the Board of Directors, which he held until the Annual General Meeting on March 15, 2017. The general assembly elected Saager as honorary president.

Publications (selection)

• with Werner Vogt: Bruno Max Saager. Post-war banking pioneer. NZZ Libro, Zurich 2017, ISBN 978-3-03810-272-4 .
• The Swiss economy and Mandela: a friend in difficult times. In: Southern Africa. Bulletin of SwissCham Southern Africa (SCSA), No. 47, January 2014 (PDF; 268 kB; on the website of the University of Basel).
• 50 years of AWP: An important partner in the Swiss financial center. In: Lead. Newsletter of the sda ​​group. No. 39, December 2007.
• with Werner Vogt: Swiss Money on Table Mountain - Economic Relations between Switzerland and South Africa between 1948 and 1994. With a foreword by Frederik Willem de Klerk , Nobel Peace Prize Laureate . Orell Füssli, Zurich 2005, ISBN 978-3-280-06006-3 .
• with Ulrich Bär, Kurt Speck, Jürg Steiner and Walter Steiner (eds.): Who Owns Whom. The Swiss Participation Atlas 1993 (13th edition). U. Bär Verlag, Zurich 1993, ISBN 978-3-905137-39-2 .
• with Hans Welte: This is how we protect our Zurich. Office for Civil Protection, Zurich 1989.
• with Peter Wirth and Bernhard Romer: The second pillar. BVG and occupational benefits. U. Bär Verlag, Zurich 1984.
• with Ulrich Meister: Quo vadis, southern Africa? Attempt to determine the location. J. Vontobel, Zurich 1983.

Private

In 2013 Saager was still considered one of the 300 richest Swiss people and was active as a patron. He was particularly involved in the environmental protection organization Peace Parks Foundation , which he co-founded with his wife in 1997 and which he supported with considerable sums as President of the Peace Parks Foundation Legacy Society . The foundation goes back to an initiative of Nelson Mandela , Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands and the South African entrepreneur Anton Rupert and aims to connect the nature reserves from Lake Victoria to the Cape of Good Hope . He also sponsored important museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York , the African Art Center in Cape Town or the Kunsthaus Zürich with its new building, as well as music festivals such as those of Davos , Glyndebourne , Salzburg , St. Petersburg (Musical Olympus) and Vicenza with András Ship .

He was a board member of SwissCham Southern Africa (SCSA, Switzerland-South Africa Chamber of Commerce), which he co-founded and whose bulletin he edited, and a member of the Zurich committee of Human Rights Watch . He was also a member of the World Baden-Powell Fellowship and was involved in the animal welfare organization Animal Trust .

Saager was a specialist in the work of Exekias , the Greek vase painter and potter from the 5th century BC. An exhibition is planned for 2018, which Saager organized together with the Institute for Archeology at the University of Zurich and to which he made his own exhibits available.

Saager was a member of the FDP, the Liberals . Since 1969 he was married to Franziska Jelena nee Roš (* 1944), an archaeologist and financial analyst; the marriage remained childless.

Web links

Hansjörg Saager on the 50th anniversary of the AWP. In: Lead. Sda newsletter, No. 39, December 2007 (video; 6:55 min)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Mario König : Interhandel. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
2. ^ Hansjürg Saager and Werner Vogt: Bruno Max Saager. Post-war banking pioneer. NZZ Libro, Zurich 2017, ISBN 978-3-03810-272-4 .
3. ↑ Hansjürg Saager.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Website of the NZZ Libro publishing house .  
4. ^ Entrepreneur Hansjürg Saager is dead. In: Personal. 19th July 2017.
5. ^ Obituary for the long-time AWP Board President Hansjürg Saager. In: Lead. Sda newsletter, No. 78, September 2017.
6. ↑ 50 years of AWP: An important partner in the Swiss financial center. In: Lead. Sda newsletter, No. 39, December 2007.
7. ↑ Peter Wirth: On the death of Hansjürg Saager. In: Pension Forum. July 21, 2017.
8. ↑ Imprint. In: AWP Social Security website .
9. ↑ Hansjürg Saager, Werner Vogt. Swiss money on Table Mountain. In: Pearl Divers . 2005.
10. ↑ Hansjürg Saager. In: Balance . 2017 (as of December 2013).
11. ^ Peace Parks Foundation Legacy Society . ( Memento of the original of July 28, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Peace Parks Foundation website. 
12. ^ Loss of a great friend and supporter. In: Peace Parks Foundation website. July 21, 2017 ("Peace Parks Foundation is deeply saddened by the loss of one of its most devoted and generous supporters") .
13. ↑ ^{a b} Obituary. In: AWP Social Security. 2017.
14. ^ The SCSA Mission and the people behind. In: SwissCham Southern Africa website.
15. ↑ Zurich Committee. In: Human Rights Watch website .
16. ^ World Baden-Powell Fellowship. Membership. In: World Scout Foundation website.
17. ↑ World Animal Conference.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Animal Trust Newsletter, Spring 2014 (PDF; 562 kB).