SALT LAKE CITY — Julius Anderegg, the consul general of Switzerland, came to Utah a couple of years ago to attend the Sundance Film Festival.
Wanting to meet some Swiss people while in town, Anderegg contacted Sandy lawyer Daniel Oswald, who serves as the honorary Swiss consul to Utah. Oswald put him in touch with Rep. Jake Anderegg, R-Lehi, who, it turns out, is a distant relative of Julius Anderegg.
Dinner led to a friendship that blossomed with more dinners over the next year. The conversation one night turned to business and whether any Swiss companies were interested in Utah. Julius Anderegg mentioned some were looking at California and other states.
"Why are they flying over Utah?" Jake Anderegg asked the consul general. "They should be coming here."
Julius Anderegg, who recently retired as consul general, invited him to Switzerland to meet with business owners in Interlaken.
Jake Anderegg, Senate President Wayne Niederhauser, R-Sandy, and House Speaker Greg Hughes, R-Draper, and others eventually traveled to Switzerland where they met billionaire Peter Spuhler, owner of Stadler Rail Group, a major manufacturer of trains worldwide.
Stadler Rail has 5,000 employees and does about $2.6 billion in sales annually. It has built rail cars to climb Germany's highest peak and withstand Helsinki winters and constructed locomotives to haul freight from Sao Paulo to the Port of Santos in Brazil.
The lawmakers started pitching Utah as a place for expansion-minded Stadler Rail to build its North American headquarters. Relationships developed — Anderegg took Spuhler and Stadler CEO Martin Ritter on a tour of Utah's national parks on one visit — and conversations ensued to the point that the mountainous Beehive State became not only attractive to the Swiss company but a real possibility.
They also talked up the Mountain Accord, a long-range plan for the Wasatch Mountains, including trains between ski resorts and a tunnel connecting canyons.
When Spuhler invited Niederhauser and Hughes to Switzerland this fall to meet with him as well as members of the Swiss parliament, Hughes quickly put a trip together, a combination of lawmakers, lobbyists and board members for UTA, with potential conflicts of interest.
From the Legislature were Hughes, Anderegg, Senate Majority Whip Stuart Adams, R-Layton, House Assistant Majority Whip Brad Wilson, R-Kaysville, and Sen. Mark Madsen, R-Saratoga Springs, who heads the Utah International Trade Commission.
Utah Transit Authority board members Chris Bleak and Sheldon Killpack, a former state senator, also joined the contingent. But they didn't tell their own transit board that they were going, a decision that would further tarnish the transit authority's reputation.
In addition to Hartley, lobbyists Greg Curtis, a former Utah House speaker, and Dave Stewart joined the contingent. All three have done work for UTA.
Also, on the trip were Hughes' chief of staff Greg Hartley, Anderegg's wife Julie, Madsen's wife Erin, and Oswald, the honorary Swiss consul in Utah.
Funding for the trip was somewhat creative: some tax dollars were spent but no UTA money.
The transit-oriented Utah 2040 PAC, for which Bleak serves as co-director, put up money for travel. World Trade Center Utah, a nonprofit that promotes Utah business interests, gave $10,000 for three dinner events in Switzerland. Hughes kicked in money from his leadership PAC and some travelers paid their own way.
As an afterthought, the delegation asked the Governor's Office of Economic Development, which was now in serious negotiations with Stadler Rail, to send a representative.
Because the state requires two months notice for overseas travel, GOED had to get permission from the governor's office to send deputy director Kimberly Henrie, who joined the trip for the last three days. GOED wound up paying $2,651 for her airfare, $1,410 for three nights hotel and $484 for meals, according to receipts obtained in an open records request.
The contingent arrived in Lucerne on Sept. 19 where they dropped their bags at Ambassador Hotel and then traveled to Alpnach to ride a mountain-climbing cog train to the top of Mount Pilatus, according to an itinerary in the documents.
The group spent the next few days riding Swiss rails between cities and over mountain passes. They toured a train tunnel under construction near the town of Frutigen and visited Stadler Rail in Bussnang. They stayed in five-star hotels such as Grand Hotel Zermatterhof, the Zurich Marriott and the Bellevue Palace in Bern.
At the end of the weeklong trip, the delegation held business meetings with Stadler and members of the Swiss parliament to discuss rail operations and funding. They were introduced to the country's President-elect Johann Schneider-Ammann, who currently serves as minister of economic affairs, education and research.
Part of the group attended a reception with U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland Suzan LeVine.
"Several times throughout the last two days, the speaker, Rep. Wilson, Sen Adams and others indicated that it was very helpful to have GOED on the trip," Henrie wrote to GOED executive director Val Hale and managing director Theresa Foxley the day before the trip ended.
"Also today during the meeting with the Ambassador, their economic development representative indicated Utah is on the short list for a helicopter company out of Switzerland and wanted to make sure we were going to be in LA at the Aerospace expo."
The delegation flew home Sept. 25, and the trip remained out of the public eye until the Deseret News obtained documents about GOED's participation through an open records request.
The documents showed that UTA abruptly canceled a competitive bid Sept. 30 — five days after the trip — when it learned that Bleak and Killpack met with Stadler Rail, which was bidding to lease space at the Warm Springs FrontRunner maintenance facility. The transit authority has since reopened the bid process.
But the fallout has given UTA another black eye to go along with bruises the past few years from criticism over high executive pay and bonuses, excessive travel abroad and loose ethics policies. The UTA board has recently taken action to correct those things.
In the wake of the Switzerland trip, the board said Wednesday that it would conduct its own investigation. It also announced that Bleak has resigned and that two other board members would also step down, presumably Killpack and Justin Allen, who along with Bleak, runs the Utah 2040 PAC.
Though Bleak apologized for creating an issue and a distraction, he said in a letter to the board that his resignation was due to a work conflict.
How or if the negative publicity affects Stadler Rail's plan remains to be seen. The GOED board is expected to discuss incentives for the company to come to Utah at its Dec. 10 board meeting.
Email: romboy@deseretnews.com
Twitter: dennisromboy; DNewsPolitics