Sabine Süsstrunk new Member of the Board of Directors of SRG SSR
The SRG Delegates' Meeting unanimously elected Sabine Süsstrunk to the SRG Board of Directors effective January 1, 2018. She succeeds Lucy Küng, who left the Board of Directors at the end of April 2017 to join the Board of Directors of the NZZ Group.
Sabine Süsstrunk was born and raised in Solothurn. She studied scientific photography at the ETH in Zurich. She went to the University of Rochester (USA) in 1991, where she earned her master's degree in electronic publishing in 1993. She then worked for Corbis Corp., which at the time owned the largest photographic database in the world. In 1999, Sabine Süsstrunk was hired by Professor Badoux (EPFL) for the Lausanne campus, with the aim of creating there the "Département de Représentation Visuelle Numérique" as a pioneer laboratory in Switzerland. In 2006, she completed her PhD in Computer Sciences at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. In 2014, Sabine Süsstrunk was appointed Full Professor of Image and Visual Representation and Head of the corresponding laboratory at EPFL, which is organizationally part of the Institute of Computer and Communication Sciences.
Allocation of funds to the regional companies 2018
Furthermore, the Assembly of Delegates has allocated around CHF 6.75 million to the four regional companies for 2018. This amount has remained unchanged since 2016 due to the ongoing savings targets. These funds are used to finance the association bodies, the audience councils, the ombudsman offices, as well as the program-relevant tasks and the civil society activities of the association in all cantons.
Maximum compensation 2018 for Board of Directors, Chair and Executive Committee
The delegates took note of the determination of the maximum compensation of the Board of Directors and the Executive Board of SRG.
On November 23, 2016, the Federal Council decided to grant the general meetings of federally affiliated companies - such as Swiss Post, SBB, Skyguide - new powers to determine the compensation of the board of directors and executive management from 2019. The Federal Council thus intends to organize the federally affiliated companies along the lines of the "Ordinance against Excessive Compensation in Listed Stock Corporations. The Federal Council recommended that the SRG and its subsidiaries include analogous provisions in their regulations.
In September 2017, the SRG Board of Directors decided to introduce the regulations for maximum compensation as early as 2018.
The necessary amendments to the Articles of Association are to be adopted - following consultation with the regional companies - at the Delegates' Meeting on April 27, 2018. The partial revision of the Articles of Association and the amended Organizational Regulations will then enter into force on July 1, 2018 (following approval by DETEC).
No Billag - a look at the regions
The four regional presidents informed the delegates' meeting about the activities that had been started and were planned in the language regions up to the vote on the No Billag initiative on March 4, 2018. This initiative was a frontal attack on the SRG institution and its mandate to provide the public audiovisual service in Switzerland. All delegates, as well as the entire sponsorship body, were called upon to stand up for the values of SRG with full commitment and to actively participate in the No Billag discussion. It is now necessary to show the population what serious consequences the acceptance of this initiative would have for the media landscape in Switzerland.