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Authorities have launched a criminal inquiry into Jost Group’s labour practices. Picture from Jost Group website 

  • Authorities have searched several Jost Group sites in Belgium and Luxembourg as part of a criminal investigation into widespread labour code violations. Prosecutors suspect the logistics firm, based northern Luxembourg, of illicitly employing 1,100 eastern Europeans in Belgium under employment contracts in their home countries. This supposedly saved the firm €55m in Belgian social insurance contributions between 2014 and 2016. Investigators also flagged potential fraud against Luxembourg’s main state health insurer. A Jost Group representative told Paperjam that the firm should be given the benefit of the presumption of innocence at this point, and that its eastern European drivers “earn four to five times more than they would earn in their country of origin”.
  • Jobs are up in the banking sector. As of 31 March, there were 26,144 employees of credit institutions in the grand duchy, according to the Luxembourg Central Bank (BCL). That’s an increase of 82 posts over the previous quarter, and 8 more positions than in March 2016.
  • The City Concorde shopping centre has broken ground on the next phase of its expansion plan. Work began in September 2016, with a new 850 spot underground parking garage opening several months ago. Now the shopping centre will add 5,000 square metres of retail space. The project is expected to be completed in November 2018, just in time for next year’s Christmas shopping season.
  • “The House of Entrepreneurship was created in September, so now we need to get it on track to reach TGV cruising speeds.” So said Carlo Thelen, managing director of the Chamber of Commerce, presenting the organisation’s annual report. Thelen also said the chamber aims to open a large, low-cost startup incubator, but still needs to find a suitable location.
  • How many cross-border commuters will work in Luxembourg 40 years from now? Today 162,000 do so, representing 43% of the country’s workforce. Eurostat, the EU statistics agency, estimated in 2013 that Luxembourg’s population in 2060 would be 1.1m, and 350,000 cross-border commuters would work here; in 2015 it forecast a population of 990,000 and 384,000 cross-border commuters. But this week, the Idea Foundation, a thinktank backed by the Chamber of Commerce, reached an entirely different forecast after analysing EU data. It reckoned that between 224,000 (if Luxembourg’s economic output becomes more productive) and 429,000 cross-border workers (if productivity does not rise) would be employed in the grand duchy.