Laureate 1995
Yves Oltramare

1995 Prize awarded to Yves Oltramare, banker and philanthropist

Friday 24 November 1995 at 5 pm, Aula Uni-Bastions, Geneva

On November 24, 1995, in the aula des Bastions at the University of Geneva, Yves Oltramare received the Foundation Prize for Geneva to the ovations of several hundred people during a ceremony attended by the Geneva authorities.

Yves Oltramare participated in the creation of a number of institutions, notably the Louis-Jeantet Foundation and the new Foundation “A Future for Geneva” which supports the efforts of the Swiss and Geneva authorities to promote our city in its international dimension. He has also worked in favor of the Salvation Army as well as for many of Geneva’s major cultural institutions, including the Grand Théâtre, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, the Musée d’art et d’histoire and the Musée Barbier Müller.

In addition to his banking activities, Yves Oltramare has worked for many years, far from the limelight, to encourage the spiritual, humanitarian and intellectual influence of Geneva. He has always seen Geneva as a privileged place for dialogue and exchange, a place, as he recalled in the aula of the Bastions, “of convergence between all the questions and potentialities of the world’s multiple cultures”.

The Fondation pour Genève, in awarding him this prize, “wishes, beyond the well-deserved tribute it pays to this personality, to honor all those who, […] often in the shadows and almost anonymously, without any spirit of return, work to keep the spirit of Geneva alive.”