Top 5 stories you might have missed

Top 5 stories you might have missed

News catch-up

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47 minutes ago

In case you miss them, the Luxembourg Times has selected the best story of the week for you

Sharing an apartment with nine strangers may not be the idea that everyone enjoys, even if there is a cinema and a gym. But the concept that pervades Luxembourg could be a breakthrough for the overheated housing market, real estate experts say.

As the cost of buying a home in the Grand Duchy continues to rise, so does the rental market. More people need to rent because they are having a hard time stepping into the real estate ladder, and the steady flow of new entrants to the country prefers to allow before investing in a home ..

Since 2018, home prices will rise by about 12% to 15% each year, reaching up to 17% in 2020. Rent increases are limited to 5% of the capital invested in real estate.

A majority of the coalition members voted against the investigation into a public waste management company, despite the controversy over the so-called SuperDrecks Këscht, which admitted that legal opinions were illegally funded.

Coalition members dismissed the request of the Investigation Council Committee, claiming that they had thoroughly scrutinized the contract. Liddie Polfer, a Democratic (DP) professional business liberal of Prime Minister Xavier Bettel, said future investigations should come from the prosecution.

Instead, lawmakers from the three ruling coalitions retroactively provided the legal basis for the € 112 million contract that the government gave to a private waste management company.

Economic Minister Franz Fayacht may not have put pressure on private companies in retaliation for employees accusing the Luxembourg government of not warning the public prior to the flood last summer, but from other officials. It does not eliminate pressure, two opposition lawmakers said Thursday.

In an interview with public radio on Thursday, Mr. Fayacht dismisses young researcher Jeff Da Costa to the Duderangi Hydrological Company shortly after the government’s failure accusations were aired by broadcaster RTL in September. He said the accusation of putting pressure on him was a “lie.” Station 100.7. He didn’t say if anyone other than his aides might have intervened on his behalf.

“It was an insubstantial and serious accusation and there was no pressure from my side. I must categorically reject the claim,” said Fayacht.

Luxembourg has frozen an additional 210 million euros in sanctioned Russian assets stored in the country’s Freeport, a building like an airport fortress subject to various tax laws, the government said on Monday. He said more than 100 days had passed since the invasion of Ukraine.

This is the second time the government has renewed the total amount of frozen Russian assets belonging to sanctioned Russians and businesses after the Luxembourg bank and other financial institutions announced last week that they had frozen around € 4.3 billion.

Former spy Frank Schneider said he and his Luxemburg company worked for crypto scammer Luja Ignatova, who allegedly fled police around the world on suspicion of a multi-billion euro one-coin scam. I admitted.

“When I worked there, it was many years ago. [the nature of OneCoin] It wasn’t completely clear to me. We can see that we are running out of a lot of money now, “Schneider said in an interview with public radio station 100,7 on Monday.

“If it was a scam and then money laundering, I would have to take responsibility for what I might have done there,” Schneider said.

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