The forgotten scandals of the financial sector

IOS, Banco Ambrosiano, BCCI… Investment funds and banks that have made headlines, drawing international attention to their legal yet highly questionable practices, sometimes leaving thousands of investors high and dry whilst enriching the puppet-masters of financial engineering. It was also these scandals that revealed the practices of the financial centre to the people of Luxembourg.

For whilst the financial centre truly came into being in the 1920s with the creation of the Luxembourg Stock Exchange and, above all, the law on holding companies, it took several decades for society to recognise it as a sector worthy of the name, if only because the Luxembourg economy seemed to be limited to the steel industry, such was its dominance. This evolution is thoroughly documented in our podcas flux, which traces the history of the Luxembourg economy from 1850 to the present day. This article is, in fact, based in part on interviews conducted as part of that project.