Ethics and governance in the European Financial centers

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.