Ethics and governance in the European Financial centers

Luxembourg has signed an agreement for the exchange of bank information on request in all tax matters with the USA, marking a major step forward in international efforts to counter tax evasion. This is the first agreement by Luxembourg with an OECD country which meets the OECD standard for information exchange.

Read OECD Press Release

Read Luxembourg Press Release

The Luxembourg Institute for Global Integrity (LIGFI) that was launched last week turns out to be a charade.

The acronym LIGFI seems actually to stand for: Luxembourg Is Going to Fool the Institutions/Investors.

As I explained:

- The fees with the relating voting rights are prohibitive and exclude those that are not wealthy,

- Its powerhouses did not demonstrate in a recent past a true involvement for ethical business behaviour.

Who could bear such initiative to promote ethics in Luxembourg?

Only new leaders (“homines novi”), with a proved capacity to question and not to condone or hush up issues, could promote with a minimum of credibility the initiative.

- The think tank Cercle Joseph Bech
- Marco Zwick, Luxembourgish,  who is Director at PRIM, Head of Compliance and Risk for Schroder Investment Management and author of a book about money laundering and banking secrecy where he did a relevant SWOT analysis of the Luxembourg Financial Center

- Carlo Damge, Luxembourgish,  former chairman of the Chartered Accountants that raised publicly the issue of the abuse of fiduciaries, which is not solved.
- Georges Gudenburg, Luxembourgish,  who admitted recently the end of banking secrecy and raised issues
- Egide Thein, Luxembourgish,  who is Founder and Chairman of Truth Technologies, Inc., a Vienna, VA based company providing anti money laundering and anti fraud solutions to the financial industry (www.truthtechnologies.com).
- Laurent Halbgewachs, French, who organises the ALFI Spring Conferences

- Luc Henzig, Luxembourgish, although he is involved in the stillborn project, he is credible in the field of ethics

...
and maybe myself as I have been calling for the paradigm shift since 2004 and as I have identified what is to be done to enhance the good reputation of Luxembourg that deserves to be a successful jurisdiction.

In a nutshell, LIGFI in its design shows that nothing was understood.