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page 182 chapter VI
on a knowledge society if we have a highly qualified
workforce.
So, it is the job of the state – as incidentally also underlined
by the Lisbon Strategy – to convince business enterprises
of the advantages that sustainable and ethical
management has for them. Businesses that uphold
the quality of their standards, and are willing to be
gauged by legitimacy criteria rather than just legality
criteria, reduce their legal, financial and image risks.
And speaking of image, I’d like to take this opportunity
to go into a debate that also affects Luxembourg,
namely the debate regarding banking secrecy and our
financial centre. In addition to the renewed European
financial architecture that we will elaborate and apply
in cooperation with our EU partners, the Luxembourg
government has also announced the re-definition of
banking secrecy in our country. In addition to the regulations
already existing in the framework of the European
Savings Taxation Directive, we have adopted
the OECD standard regarding the exchange of information
in the context of double taxation agreements.
We have in this way put a stop to tax evasion. This step
was already announced in March 2009 and puts us
on a level with all the other OECD Member States. The
fact that the OECD Secretariat nonetheless let itself be
abused by various G20 members to put Luxembourg
on a Black List without consulting us as a founding
member of the OECD, is an unacceptable method. If
our financial centre is to be systematically denigrated
with the help of the German language, then I would
like to emphasise here in Berlin that its success is in no
way attributable to tax evasion. This is just the popu-