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Luxembourg country profile

The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg – a small country landlocked by Belgium, France and Germany – is a prominent financial centre.

With roots stretching back to the 10th century, Luxembourg's history is closely intertwined with that of its more powerful neighbours, especially Germany.

Many of its inhabitants are trilingual in French, German and Luxembourgish – a dialect of German.

Despite declaring its neutrality, Luxembourg was occupied by Germany during both World Wars. Attempts to escape German influence initially led to an economic union with Belgium in 1921.

After renewed occupation in World War II, Luxembourg abandoned its neutrality and became a front-rank enthusiast for international co-operation.

Luxembourg became a founder member of a customs union with Belgium and the Netherlands in 1948, and of the European Economic Community, a forerunner of the European Union, in 1957. Around one-third of Luxembourg's population are foreigners.

Luxembourg's prosperity was formerly based on steel manufacturing. With the decline of that industry, Luxembourg diversified and is now best known for its status as Europe's most powerful investment management centre.

But the country's strict laws on banking secrecy produced a system that was open to exploitation for the purposes of tax evasion and fraud.

Concern over Luxembourg's reputation as a tax haven – especially in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis – prompted the G20 group of countries to add it to a "grey list" of nations with questionable banking arrangements in April 2009.

Luxembourg responded by taking steps to improve the transparency of its financial arrangements. By July 2009 it had signed agreements on the exchange of tax information with a dozen countries, and was commended by the OECD for its prompt efforts to implement the internationally agreed standard.

Luxembourg's politics are characterised by stability and long-serving administrations.

This tranquillity was interrupted in 2008, when Grand Duke Henri said his conscience would not allow him to sign into law a bill approving euthanasia.

The crisis was resolved by a constitutional reform which removed the need for laws to be approved by the monarch, reducing the post to a largely ceremonial role.

May 14 2012 | Top Stories | Comments Off

Free Trade Agreement or Futile Talk and Agony?

By ANSGAR SICKERT

You might be forgiven for not noticing that a trade delegation from the European Union recently descended upon India’s capital to give the attempts of concluding a comprehensive free-trade agreement a much-needed boost. Perhaps because it was around the same time as the world leaders’ forum in Davos, India-EU free trade negotiations flew firmly below the radar screen of the world’s media.

Ansgar Sickert

The recent visit by the EU’s new trade negotiator Karel de Gucht was by comparison more high profile. He believes negotiations can be concluded by the end of the year if some of the remaining sticky issues can be resolved.

Over the last one and a half decades India has concluded over a dozen free trade agreements with countries or regional blocks such as ASEAN, Sri Lanka and South Korea. Others with Japan and New Zealand are on the anvil.

With the WTO’s Doha round still in a state of hibernation this flurry of bilateral deals is perhaps not surprising. The EU is also no sloth in strengthening its trade ties and has concluded trade agreements with the 78-member group Africa, Caribbean and Pacific countries, the Gulf Cooperation Council, South Africa, Mexico, Chile, South Korea. More with India, ASEAN and Mercosur are in the pipeline.

With many economists speculating that a double-dip recession is around the corner, trade liberalization could give a much needed fillip to the global economy. As it is India’s most important trading partner, a bilateral agreement with the EU would undoubtedly represent a beacon for both economies.

Negotiations between the two partners started in June, 2007 and looked promising at first but subsequently lost steam. Last November’s annual India-EU Business Summit in New Delhi was a turning point. Leaders on both sides seemed to rediscover their enthusiasm, declaring that a deal should be concluded by the end of this year.

This is to be strongly welcomed not just by the business communities in India and the EU but the world over. By definition bilateral agreements can be far more ambitious and far reaching than multi-lateral talks involving many countries.

The current WTO negotiations were kicked off in November, 2001 and seek to address a host of sensitive issues such as reductions in tariff and non-tariff measures, agriculture, labor, environment, transparency, services and intellectual property. It is easy to see why a conclusion of the WTO’s Doha round remains elusive.

The EU’s attempt to include politically-sensitive issues in its FTA negotiations with India has led to considerable resistance from the New Delhi which views climate change, intellectual property rights or child-labor as “extraneous” non-trade issues that should be tackled elsewhere.

Whether such issues should indeed be part of bilateral free trade negotiations is debatable, particularly since they are already discussed in many other multilateral forums. However with growing concern amongst the European electorate about loosing jobs to Indian outsourcing companies, the EU cannot but deal with its own internal political constraints. The EU has such clauses in all its bilateral FTAs and without them any agreement is likely to get rejected by the European Parliament.

India also has many areas where it needs to tread carefully due to domestic political sensitivities. With serious moral concerns in parts of India’s body politic and society, reducing import tariffs, lowering internal levies and easing restrictions on alcoholic beverage imports will take some political courage.

Clearly the newly found momentum should be seized to bring the negotiations to a successful conclusion. Both sides recognize that an awful lot of work remains to be done before the year is up. Trade organizations such as the European Business Group in India, FICCI and CII have been lobbying to push governments towards a comprehensive agreement.

The EU and India have set an ambitious goal of more than doubling their bilateral trade to $200 billion dollars in the next four years if a free trade deal is concluded. That would be an impressive increase in trade from the $82 billion achieved in the fiscal year ended March 31, 2009.

India should be less concerned about the inclusion of “extraneous” issues in the FTA as most of the provisions are in any case either covered by domestic legislation or non-binding.

But more than propping up flagging economic growth and international trade statistics in Europe and India, a successful FTA might even help reenergize the WTO talks.

—Ansgar Sickert is the New Delhi Based managing director of Fraport India and a council member of the European Business Group in India.

May 14 2012 | Top Stories | Comments Off

In Italy, a Volcanic Vintage

“Do you drink wines from Italia?” asked my French companion on a recent visit to Burgundy. “Sure,” I replied. “I drink wines from Italia—from Piedmont, Tuscany, the Veneto, Campania—yes, all the time. Why? You?” The answer confused him; in France, it seems they rarely drink wine from the neighboring village, let alone another country.

In fact, a quick flick through the diary shows that in the past month, for pleasure as opposed to formal tastings, I have enjoyed wines from France (Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne), California, Canada (my brother-in-law is from Toronto; we drink Canadian wine together), Australia, Portugal, South Africa and, yes, Italy.

Drinking Now

Etna Rosso Calderara Sottana

Tenuta delle Terre Nere, Sicily

Vintage: 2008

Price: about £20 or €24

Alcohol content: 14%

Planted at around 700 meters above sea level, the vines on this vineyard are pre-phylloxera. Made from the indigenous Nerello Mascalese, this is an impressive wine, with deep autumnal notes, such as spice, dark fruits and sloe.

“They’re really very good,” I went on. “You should try them when you get the chance. Start with Valpolicella. It’s nice and fruity, with an overpowering cherry flavor. It’s great at lunchtime with a big bowl of pasta.” Intrigued, he promised to taste some Italian wine the next time he visited the country, which suggested that he had been to Italy before but had never tried its wines. I probed no further.

But those who know Italian wines well would have deplored my choice. I should have suggested my French companion try the wines from Sicily, in particular the wines from Mount Etna, especially those grown from vines on the lower slopes of the volcanic mountain. For it is here, amid the high altitude and volcanic soils, that some of Italy’s most exciting wines are being produced.

At Tenuta delle Terre Nere, near Randazzo, the red wines have an ethereal quality—high in acidity, with a delicate, herbaceous character that is reminiscent of Burgundian Pinot Noir. In short, they are quite unlike what one would imagine wines from Sicily to taste like: They are texturally light and retain a purity and freshness.

I haven’t been to Sicily. My introduction to the island came via the big screen when a young Al Pacino, playing the iconic mafia villain Michael Corleone in “The Godfather,” wandered the arresting rural landscapes, having been exiled for murdering the fictional drug lord Virgil Sollozzo. That, and the old bottle of Marsala my parents kept at the back of the drinks cabinet.

For those who haven’t enjoyed the privilege, Marsala is rather like an Italian sherry. The Marsala industry was started by an Englishman, John Woodhouse, in the late 18th century; its popularity during the Napoleonic wars was helped by the fact that the British admiral, Lord Nelson, kept his fleet well stocked with bottles of it. These days, Marsala gets a bit of a bad press; yes, the cheap versions can be exceptionally nasty, but chilled down, especially with Christmas pudding, it can be delicious.

My third introduction to Sicily came a few years ago, when I discovered the wines of Planeta, which began producing in the mid-1990s. Planeta is one of a handful of Sicilian producers such as Firriato, Morgante and Spadafora that are putting this small, mountainous island back on the wine-producing map. I was impressed by their Chardonnay and Merlot, which had notes of oregano and stewed fruit. They also produce a spicy, complex white wine made from the Fiano grape.

But it is the wines from Sicily’s fast-growing Etna wine region that are without a doubt the most exciting on the island. Sicily has one of the oldest wine-making lineages in the world, tracing its viticulture roots to the settlement of the Greeks in the eighth century B.C. Etna DOC really came alive in the mid-90s, when a small group of winemakers stunned the international market with the flavors they derived.

One of those winemakers was Marc de Grazia, who owns Tenuta delle Terre Nere wine estate. I recently had the chance to taste through their range and was impressed with the 2008 vintage. The estate is made up of around 30 hectares, planted at an altitude of between 600 and 900 meters above sea level—just about the highest a vine can be planted in the Old World. The soil is mostly made up of volcanic ash and sand, but years of eruptions have led to myriad different soil types. The weather also plays an important factor, being both unpredictable and what the estate describes as “airy”; The vineyard, which isn’t enclosed by hills, sits exposed to the elements.

The principal grape variety is Nerello Mascalese, which is indigenous to Sicily. Tasting these wines, one can feel the power and intensity; you can almost taste the volcanic ash. I just hope Mount Etna doesn’t erupt anytime soon.

Write to Will Lyons at wsje.weekend@wsj.com

May 14 2012 | Top Stories | Comments Off

U.S. Military Mission: Pushing Afghans To Take Lead

Story By: by Tom Bowman

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- Lt. Col. Wilson Rutherford, about the Afghan army

The homes are a collection of huts with no doors. Reed mats and blankets cover the floors. Sheep, chickens and small children dart across the dirt. An American fighter plane keeps watch high overhead.

Longto sends the Afghan soldiers to search the camp.

“We don’t go into people’s homes. So the Afghans will go into the homes by themselves,” he says.

The Afghan soldiers search the huts and help the Americans question a tall, bearded man. He is the only military-aged man there, so the Americans wipe his hand with a swab. The man tests positive for nitrates, a key ingredient in roadside bombs.

It’s supposed to be an Afghan patrol, but Longto is giving the orders.

“The ANA should do a slightly more thorough search. See if they can find something,” he commands.

Soon the Afghans emerge from the hut with something more interesting, a plastic bag full of a black, tarlike substance: heroin.

It’s quickly confiscated, and the patrol moves on.

The pattern repeats itself all afternoon: The patrol arrives at a mud compound. The Afghans lead the search. And the Americans tell them they didn’t do it right.

Brig. Gen. Ahmed Habbibi of the Afghan National Army salutes his soldiers in Panjwai district near Kandahar in southern Afghanistan.

Will They Be Ready?

Finally, the sun is starting to set. The patrol is over.

McMurray, the platoon leader, has been in the area for a little over a month; he says that he is already frustrated. Training the Afghan troops, he says, will take a long time.

“We have to keep pushing them,” McMurray says.

And when will the Afghan troops be ready?

“The ANA is a new army,” says Afghan Brig. Gen. Ahmed Habbibi, who commands the Afghan army in this area. He adds that they need training and equipment.

But he never answers whether his troops will be ready when the American combat mission ends in 2014.

When the same question is posed to Lt. Col. Wilson Rutherford, the American commander at Zangabad, he has this reply: “The answer for that is they’ll have every opportunity to be successful.”

Rutherford is pushing that process along. He was able to get Habbibi to fire two Afghan army commanders for incompetence.

“They understand they have to win,” Rutherford says. “They have to get it right.”

The Afghans have two more years to make that happen.

May 13 2012 | Top Stories | Comments Off

Losing pieces of America’s past?

Montague — Magnificent Montague, as he’s been known since his days as a pioneering radio DJ — amassed an 8,000-piece collection reflecting names from the well-known to the forgotten to those history never thought to remember. It’s valued in the millions; some call it priceless. One assessment of just five of the pieces puts the total value of those treasures alone somewhere between $592,000 and $940,000.

“I shudder to even fantasize what it could go for,” said appraiser Philip Merrill, who performed the assessment.

For decades Montague carted the collection of African-American artwork, artifacts and ephemera around the country with his family as he took jobs at radio stations in New York, Chicago, Oakland, and Los Angeles, and then finally to Las Vegas, where he moved 12 years ago after closing a station he built from the ground up in Palm Springs, California.

The Montague Collection was his prized possession, but because of financial woes he has lost it. It is now up for auction.

“I have not been able to maintain the collection for the last couple of years,” Montague said. While working with his wife of 56 years, Rose Casalan, to archive and prepare the collection for sale, he took out a loan to help pay for the archiving, found himself overextended financially and declared bankruptcy. His collection was seized, and it is now in the hands of a trusteeship charged with selling it to satisfy his debts, including a judgment for $325,000 plus interest and court fees.

If no one steps up to buy the collection in its entirety, Montague’s life’s work could be dismantled and sold off in pieces to pay his creditors.

In the meantime, it is stored in a confidential location in Nevada.

Boxed and hidden under tight security in Las Vegas — away from the city’s bright lights and infamous Strip — is the item that sparked his collection: a set of first-edition Paul Laurence Dunbar books Montague purchased in Washington in 1956.

“One day I stumbled into a book by Paul Laurence Dunbar,” he said. Until that day, he had never thought of collecting memorabilia — much less heard of Dunbar, author of novels, short stories and essays, and the first African-American to gain national acclaim as a poet.

“I bought the book, and I never looked back after that,” Montague said.

It was the first time he saw the “Negro dialect” Dunbar was known for using in his early poetry, and it sparked his interest in African-American culture — “the Negro problem,” as it was called in periodicals in the 1950s.

“I began to learn who some of the blacks were in the 1800s and 1700s, and I was shocked. I said, ‘Well, I have to do something about this.’ So I started going to bookshops and visiting the dealers. And I would ask, ‘Do you have anything black? Negro?’”

He looked for first editions and signed copies, no matter the cost. “I just had to have it,” he said. “I had to bid my brains out.”

He dug through magazine crates and traveled the country visiting rare book stores and auctions. He once traveled from Los Angeles to Germany to purchase “The African,” an 1890 pastel drawing of an African king wearing traditional robes. It was drawn and signed by Austrian artist Rudolf von Mehoffer, who was known for his portraits of German and Austrian royalty.

“I would spend sometimes a day, hours, in a place going through old magazines, looking for something about the Negro. Something about the word ‘colored.’ Something about the word ‘black,’” he said.

“I didn’t collect; I chased,” he said, making investments in time, money and energy that he says he cannot measure. “I was not writing history; I was chasing it.”

For more than 50 years he memorized names of writers, artists and filmmakers, hunted them, found them, and added their works to his collection. There are pieces that inspire him, like the first edition of Phillis Wheatley’s “Poems on Various Subjects,” dated 1773 and signed by the author, who was born a slave and became the first African-American to have a published book.

There’s a 1944 Fred Sapp oil painting of Toussaint L’Ouverture, leader of the rebellion that emancipated Haiti’s slaves in 1801.

He also has pieces he considers historical yet repugnant, such as sheet music to the 1900 song “Coon, Coon, Coon” and a 1935 advertisement for “The World’s Only Flying Negro Singers.”

Also secured in the Las Vegas vault is a fundraising letter Booker T. Washington wrote seeking financial assistance for 221 students at Tuskegee, the college he founded in 1881. There are photographs, receipts and letters from the Lincoln Motion Picture Co., the nation’s first all-black production company. Brothers George and Noble Johnson operated it from 1916 to 1923, producing five full-length films and other works they showed mainly in black churches and small assembly halls.

Montague acquired a copy of the Liberator, an anti-slavery newspaper published from 1831 to 1865, when the Civil War ended and the 13th Amendment was ratified, abolishing slavery.

There’s the 1820 bill of sale for “Two Negro boys George + Paris,” who were sold for a total of $1,230, and a contract with Negro Nancy, who with an “X” and a thumbprint agreed to a life of indentured servitude in Pennsylvania.

“I’d say I have 500 to 600 items that the public have never seen and will never see until they see the collection,” Montague said, including memorabilia and recordings from his time as a DJ and radio station owner, where he recited poetry with soul music pioneer Sam Cooke, performed with R&B artist Wilson Pickett and coined the phrase, “Burn, Baby, Burn.”

Montague says he came up with the phrase in 1962 while working at a station in New York. He was given a copy of Pickett’s new song, “If You Need Me,” and he fell in love with it.

It was a custom to say “buuurn” when music was moving.

“Something hit me, and I said, ‘Burn, Baby, Burn,’” Montague said. Then he asked his listeners to call in and experience it with him.

“If you like the record, call me and say, ‘Montague, Burn, Baby, Burn.’”

That night a catchphrase was born. Students would call in with their name and their school and say “Burn, Baby, Burn” to express their pleasure with the R&B and soul hits he was spinning. They’d howl and he’d drop the latest album by the Platters, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder — “All the heavyweights, baby” — and together they’d exclaim, “Buuurn.”

Magnificent Montague took his show — and his hot catchphrase — from New York to Chicago, and from Chicago to Los Angeles, where he arrived three months before the August 1965 Watts riots.

By then, “Burn, Baby, Burn” had caught on in Los Angeles and quickly became the battle cry for those taking to the streets after a white highway patrolman arrested a black motorist on suspicion of drunken driving. It was a hot night in the Watts neighborhood, and the scene soon escalated into a confrontation between police and nearby residents. Tensions between the black community and police boiled over, and a week later 34 people were dead and more than 1,000 were injured. More than 600 buildings were damaged or destroyed.

“They wanted to be recognized,” Montague said of the rioters. “And the only way they could be recognized with what was going on in Watts, what happened with this young man, what happened with no jobs, all of this grief, the easiest thing to use is what they knew how to use.”

He stopped using the phrase after that, but he kept the recordings and added them to his collection.

Merrill, who assessed the collection, calls him a hero.

“You’re not going to see another collection like this,” said Merrill, who is an appraiser on PBS’s “Antiques Roadshow” and a consultant for the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture.

“Sometimes you find mass-produced pieces,” like posters, brochures or pamphlets, Merrill said. “This is not that. It’s all rare and one-of-a-kind.

“The collection was built on love,” Merrill said. “He did this for future generations.”

For 50 years Montague kept his pieces in public storage facilities, protected by nothing but a padlock. It was set up as his personal museum. Paintings and documents were framed and hung. Books and periodicals were meticulously organized. He kept a small desk and chair in the storage bin and spent time with the collection every day, reading and researching.

“No one knew where it was,” Montague said. “It had no address. Nobody knew nothing. Not even the storage people knew what I had.”

When it was time for him to move to a new city, he’d find a new home for his family and a new home for his collection. He’d drive behind the movers and keep an eye on it.

“When I first started collecting, I had no plan,” Montague said. “I was drunk with the passion to collect. I had no plan to do anything with it but keep it. To hoard it for myself. Have it in my house. It was for me. I was doing it for Magnificent Montague.”

Eventually he decided it was something that needed to be shared. He saw “museum libraries” on trips to Europe, places where artifacts could be viewed and touched but not checked out. He wanted to do the same with his collection.

“I’d like to see it where the people of America — the young people mainly — can have access to it, where it can be toured if possible,” he said.

He didn’t get a chance to finish his work. After the judgment against him was filed, he declared bankruptcy in August 2011, and the collection was seized in October.

“It’s an emotional case,” said Dotan Melech, the federal bankruptcy trustee assigned to administer the estate. “The conventional approach to bankruptcy is to take the few items that were worth anything, sell it and satisfy the debt, and give the debtor the rest of the items. That’s the conventional approach to bankruptcy. That’s what any bankruptcy trustee would’ve done.”

However after meeting Montague, Melech said he caught his passion. “It’s very contagious,” he said.

“This is an opportunity to do something that can really benefit future generations and educate for many years to come, and I share the same desire and objective as the debtor has in this case,” Melech said.

“I feel that this is an opportunity for the bankruptcy system to do the right thing.”

He is looking for what he calls a win-win situation, where the debt can be satisfied and the collection can remain intact.

Merrill, a collector himself, is worried that won’t happen.

“It’s like a basketball game, and we’re in the fourth quarter,” he said.

The trusteeship has targeted universities, museums and collectors as potential buyers, but so far no one has moved forward. The next step may be selling it in pieces. Eventually the debt must be settled.

For now, the Montague Collection remains intact and out of sight. Montague misses it.

CNN recently was granted access to the collection on the condition that the location and other details of the storage facility would not be disclosed. Montague was able to visit it, as well. With the exception of a few items — Phillis Wheatley’s book, Negro Nancy’s contract, and a pincushion crafted by Patrick Reason — all he was able to touch were the boxes.

He was satisfied, even chuckling at how he nearly didn’t purchase the pincushion from a shop in Florida.

“This lady, she has this little pincushion. I say, ‘What do I want with a pincushion?’ and she says, ‘Oh, you want this one. This one I think is important,’” he recalled.

He bought it, and later while thumbing through his history books came across Reason, a freeborn black abolitionist who expressed his anti-slavery sentiments through art.

The pincushion — engraved with an image and the words “Black Man Kneeling in Chains” — was sold by white abolitionists as a fundraiser.

“It’s in good hands,” Montague said of the piece and his collection. He speaks of it as if the only potential outcome is what he longs for, that it will stay together.

“They are able to do for it … and present it and get it sold,” he said, rubbing the boxes.

He says he has no regrets, and he sounds hopeful.

“If tomorrow it was said to me, ‘Take it back; take it back; take it back. Everything is all right, take it back,’ I would turn it down,” he said.

“I can’t do it justice. I’ve done my thing, and I’ve done it from my heart and soul. Now it deserves better than me. The hurt is surpassed by where it is going to go, and what it is going to be.”

Meanwhile, Melech continues to search for a buyer who will keep it intact so it won’t have to be sold piecemeal.

“Once you do that you’re going to break two things,” he said. “You’re going to break the collection, and you’re going to break his heart.”

Digital Content Producer Brandon Ancil produced the video and photos.