Ethics and governance in the European Financial centers

In an article a couple of months ago I underlined the risks in Luxembourg because of companies linked to exotic jurisdictions that are tolerated despite "red flags" in official sources.
Iceland Review yesterday published an interesting article that confirms that the Luxembourg jurisdiction may be used to commit frauds.
According to the newspaper such companies are first and foremost established to hide ownership patterns or funds and assets that were earned in a questionable manner.
Former Minister of Business Affairs Björgvin G. Sigurdsson stated that "One of the main things that must be done when this legal frame is reviewed, is to prevent such things from happening again".

As I said in a previous article the Luxembourg regulator is doing a much better communication on Madoff than the Irish regulator in a context of both jurisdictions are in question because of their investment funds.

The feeling of this better communication on the Madoff case is confirmed by a google search on the keyword "Madoff" with site:.ie and site:.lu.

The result is today the following :

- site:.ie : 3 200 results for a country of 70 283 km² (+ 14 148 km² for Northern Ireland)
- site:.lu : 5 430 results for a country of 2 586 km².

In my opinion this may be an indicator that the debate on Madoff is more active in Luxembourg than in Ireland despite the wording of the law of transposition of the UCITS directive is morefaithfull in Ireland than in Luxembourg.

Peter Macfarlane has reported that last week Nicolas Sarkozy relaunched attacks on the two tax haven principalities bordering France: Andorra and Monaco, as well as the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. He said that would “review its relations” with neighboring financial havens such as Luxembourg, Andorra and Monaco. The Sarkozy announced that he and German Chancellor Angela Merkel would be attending a summit in London in early April at which the matter would be discussed further
As I already said President Sarkozy is co-prince of Andorra and it was not fair to criticise Luxembourg without taking into account Monaco and above all Andorra. It is like the “Stop tax Haven Abuse Act” (that does not identify Monaco and Andorra as tax havens) that does not quote Delaware as a tax haven.

Paris dispatched an envoy Christian Fremont to Andorra to put further pressure on the Andorran government, who have otherwise been distracted this week by record snowfalls, reports our man in Andorra. Peter Macfarlane observed that Andorra is the only European country with bank secrecy written into its constitution, and has been blacklisted as “uncooperative” by other European authorities in the past, along with Liechtenstein, another mountainous tax haven principality.