Swisscows Search Engine Selling Shares

[engine]

The privacy-based search engine, Swisscows, is now selling shares.

Swisscows AG is selling limited number of participation certificates!

[swisscows.com...]

[lammert]

A few things. I cannot find how high or low the limit is of the number of shares they want to sell or any financial info about the company. And you have to send money first, then the share is sent to you which can take a month.

I know Switzerland is outside the jurisdiction of the EU and sets their own financial rules for a reason, but I am quite sure such a shady process would not be allowed in many countries.

<offtopic>Maybe time for WebmasterWorld to change to Unicode in the backend?</offtopic>

[NickMNS]

@lammert

but I am quite sure such a shady process would not be allowed in many countries.

Now now! shady process, there is nothing shady. I guess you didn't follow the supporting link on their website. It is from a reputable source, and fully explains in detail what a "Participation Certificate" is. Here is that link: [en.wikipedia.org...]

Don't bother clicking the link. Here is the full explanation:

A Participation Certificate (PC) is a special form of participation in Swiss stock corporations (Partizipationsschein). Although this security secures property rights in the issuing company, the participation certificate does not confer any membership or voting rights. The issue of this special financing tool is intended to provide the company with equity capital. By not having voting rights, the company also protects itself against unintended influences from unwanted shareholders. After all, these shareholders have no voting rights and thus only limited or no influence at all on the company's policy.

This seems like a very Swiss way of running a business. I specially like this:
"... the company also protects itself against unintended influences from unwanted shareholders"

We want your money, but we don't want you as a shareholder.

If they asked me (obviously they didn't), they should sell certificates as NFT's (Non-Fungible Tokens), then at least they would be both shady and trendy!

[lucy24]

<offtopic>

Indeed. Since my brain is not in top order, I had to feed
in der Ihre Privatsphäre geschützt ist.
into the text editor and play the convert-to-Windows, reinterpret-as-Unicode game to see what it really says. (Well, mainly because I wanted the second word to be “geschätzt” and couldn't figure out why the two ä came out different. D’oh!)

But in this specific case, I don’t think this site is to blame, since ü and ä are securely Latin-1. Something got lost in translation between moocow’s website and someone’s browser.