Fake vaccination certificate from trainer: SRF reporter gets in trouble

Bern (Switzerland) – And suddenly all the old Corona wounds have reopened! A special scandal has been shaking Switzerland for more than a week: it’s about a fake vaccination paper, about ice hockey, about lies, about insults and now even about the jobs of Swiss television bosses. BILD explains the affair that is causing great excitement in our otherwise quiet neighboring country.

The focus is on Patrick Fischer (50), a Swiss ice hockey legend: successful as a player, then celebrated coach of the national team, affectionately called “Nati” by the Swiss. Fischer led Switzerland to runners-up in the World Cup several times. Now the absolute highlight was to follow for him: the World Cup tournament at home, which starts on May 15th.

But right before that, Fischer was thrown out. The reason: He publicly admitted last week that he would be starting 2022 with a fake one Crown-Certificate had traveled to the Winter Olympics in Beijing: forgery! A year later, the Lucerne public prosecutor’s office sentenced him to a fine of 38,910 francs (around 42,000 euros).

None of this would have come out if Fischer himself hadn’t told this story to a TV journalist: SRF reporter Pascal Schmitz. He was working on a portrait of the celebrity coach when, without being asked, he confided his fake story to him over dinner. The journalist then began researching the story. The affair got rolling and couldn’t be stopped.

Initially, the Swiss Ice Hockey Association (SIHF) tried to keep Fischer as a “national team” coach. He had already been convicted as a private individual for his behavior in 2023, so everything was settled. A little later, however, the association kicked Fischer out: “From today’s perspective, our initial assessment that the matter is closed was not enough. It is about values ​​and respect that are central to Swiss Ice Hockey and were not lived by Patrick Fischer in 2022,” it said in an official statement.

Switzerland was now in turmoil, divided into two camps: on the one hand, those who considered the matter to be over long ago and a private matter anyway. On the other hand, there are those who now see Fischer as a role model as obsolete.

Things got heated and the affair spread. Because suddenly it also cost SRF reporter Pascal Schmitz his job, at least in front of the camera. Because only shortly after it became known that he had initiated the investigation against Fischer, the journalist found himself in the line of fire.

Should he have been allowed to use the contents of the confidential conversation for research purposes? “We have not violated any off-the-record agreement. Such an agreement must be explicitly concluded by both parties before the statement. In this case, that did not happen,” Schmitz told “Blick”.

Everything cleared up? Are you kidding me? Are you serious when you say that. Now the journalist’s old Facebook posts also appeared.

15 year old sentences, dug out from the “World WeekThe Swiss weekly magazine calls Schmitz the “sneaker of the nation” and accuses him of sharing offensive and racist content on social networks.

After these allegations and the publication of his contributions, Schmitz immediately resigned from his position as stadium spokesman for the Rapperswil-Jona Lakers ice hockey team. And Swiss television distanced itself from its employee’s comments. This was followed by the decision not to allow Schmitz in front of the camera for the time being: “SRF is in close contact with Pascal Schmitz and is analyzing the facts and the current allegations. SRF is not providing any further details for personnel law reasons,” says SRF press spokesman Roger Muntwyler.

Schmitz apologized “formally for these statements,” Muntwyler further emphasized. When Schmitz will host “Schweiz aktuell” again is “still open,” said the SRF press spokesman to “Blick”.

But that’s not enough. Now the TV bosses are under pressure. Have you dropped your own employee? They were silent for days, but now Tristan Brenn, SRF editor-in-chief, spoke out in “Switzerland at the Weekend”: Because his old posts were “out of the question,” they had no choice but to take Schmitz off the screen. At the same time, he criticized that journalists who published inconvenient research were “increasingly publicly pilloried and defamed as informers.”

This is still a long way from calming down tempers in Switzerland. The “Fischer Affair” continues to spread.