Shipping family now Switzerland’s richest, say papers
The MSC shipping company carries all kinds of goods all around the world.
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The Aponte family in Geneva has become the richest in Switzerland, thanks to the pandemic, according to two Sunday newspapers.
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This family owns the Mediterranean Shipping company (MSC), which has the largest fleet of container ships in the world, write Le Matin Dimanche and the SonntagsZeitung. The Aponte wealth is now estimated at as much as $100 billion, which would make them one of the richest in the world.
How did obscure Italian shipowners amass the biggest fortune ever seen in Switzerland?” asks Le Matin. To shed some light on this, the papers talked to dozens of people, including insiders. Le Matin says Gianluigi Aponte, the 82-year-old head of the family, refused an interview but that MSC “replied to some of our questions”.
When Covid-19 hit the world in early 2020, some shipping companies feared world trade would collapse and put part of their fleet in the dock, but the reverse happened, writes Le Matin. Westerners confined at home went on an online spending spree, and shipping prices soared. MSC, whose huge ships carry all kinds of things all over the world, benefitted.
“During Covid, MSC made more money than during the whole previous decade,” it quotes someone close to the company as saying.
Le Matin also writes that the company’s carbon emissions – 34 million tonnes in 2021 – are equivalent to “those of the whole of Switzerland”.
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