On Tuesday, simultaneous searches were carried out at two ministries, several municipalities, companies, and private homes. According to the searches, around 200 files were involved. In total, 27 searches have been carried out over the past three years. The public prosecutor's office also criticised the fact that the exchange of information with the administrations was too restricted under the current legal framework.
The case raises many questions. How could a system involving fake diplomas, employment contracts, and visas have functioned for years? Pirate MP Sven Clement offered his reading of the picture.
When talking about diplomas, Clement said, the discussion was most likely about qualified or paper-qualified immigration, meaning not people coming to Luxembourg with refugee status but people arriving on a visa. That, he added, meant several stages spread across different ministries, each of which should have raised the alarm. It begins with the Ministry of Education and the recognition of diplomas.
The second question then arises when a temporary residence permit is applied for, which falls to the General Department of Immigration (DGIM), now under the Home Affairs Ministry, where the entire file is supposed to be reviewed. That is where he had questions, since, as he read the file, the employment contracts must have been fictitious. The third safeguard is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, through its embassies. In this instance, he said, three ministries at three different levels either failed to carry out their oversight role, or, as in a Swiss cheese model, the holes lined up in a particularly unhappy way.
The public prosecutor's office itself also criticised the difficult exchange of information between the judiciary and the administrations in a press release. A new law has been in place since May, but it applies only to certain criminal offences. Corruption and money laundering, for example, are not covered. It is a debate that goes back to the so-called Jucha database of the judiciary and the question of how it may be used. That was a topic of intense discussion in the last legislative period, said former Justice Minister and now déi Gréng (Green) MP Sam Tanson.
In that context, Tanson recalled, she had also included a provision in the Jucha bill, which was itself a novelty, to say that even where an investigation was still under way, the employer could be informed. Whether the current case fell into that category, she said, she could not tell, since she had no details. In its initial version, the provision had been very broad and had met with considerable pushback, both in the Chamber and at the level of the Council of State, where the article in question ran into strong opposition, on the grounds that the safeguards were insufficient and the provision went too far. The text was then reworked.
The second part of the bill was in effect only voted through in May 2026, with the same restrictions. As a result, some information cannot be exchanged in every case, particularly where money laundering, corruption, abuse of power, misappropriation, forgery, and the use of forged documents are concerned.
Tanson said the committee had already had an exchange with the public prosecutor's office and that it made sense to revisit those questions if there were indeed still obstacles standing in the way of proper communication. In that case, she said, the question would have to be asked again, and the text potentially reopened, perhaps to go back to what the bill she had originally tabled had provided for, namely that the option of sharing information should exist for all crimes and misdemeanours.
Democratic Party MP Carole Hartmann also sees a need for action if it turns out that data protection concerns effectively hampered investigators. If it is now the case, she said, that certain information cannot be passed on by the administrations because of data protection rules in such a large and important case, then in her view the issue has to be looked at, as the prosecutor's office has itself been asking for some time. The judiciary, she added, should be given the legal certainty and the framework on personal data protection they need to carry out their work in law enforcement as effectively as possible.
For now, the politicians involved do not want to comment on the specific allegations. The first step, they say, is to await the results of the investigation.
