As reported by Tageblatt and the Luxemburger Wort, businessman Kindy Fritsch is suing the municipality of Esch-sur-Alzette for €130 million, on the grounds that it failed to honour its obligations under the Portal Eent real estate project.
While former mayor Georges Mischo is pushing back, the opposition is calling for answers.
The dispute concerns a plot of around 50 ares at the corner of Boulevard Prince Henri and Rue Victor Hugo in Esch. The Martin Losch garage used to stand on the site, which now looks more like a park nobody is looking after.
A real estate project was supposed to have been built there long ago, but the plans have shifted repeatedly over the years.
In 2020, an agreement was signed between the municipality and "PORTAL EENT S.à.r.l." that provided, among other things, for the municipality to take on 11 housing units, which it would later make available to socially disadvantaged people. A series of further administrative hurdles were then cleared, until in November 2023 the municipality intervened with the land registry to cancel the preparation of the vertical land register.
Asked why the municipality had done so at the time, former mayor Georges Mischo said he could no longer say, since he was no longer following the file. Portal Eent, he said, had been a complete project, then reworked under the previous promoter in line with all the PAP requirements and the building regulations of the City of Esch, and it was essentially meant to be taken over one for one.
He therefore struggles to understand what had happened next.
Esch Luxembourg Socialist Workers' Party (LSAP) councillor Steve Faltz is not satisfied with that answer. What is needed now, he said, is the underlying data to establish whether this happened, why it happened, and above all who was in charge of communication.
Consequences, he argued, would have to follow, since a municipality cannot look to stop a project through administrative channels without a valid reason, and that reason is not apparent from the information he currently has. Faltz also complained that the opposition in Esch is generally not being kept sufficiently informed.
Kindy Fritsch, who is now behind the Portal Eent project, also accuses the municipality of Esch of having withdrawn around €9.5 million earmarked for that scheme in 2024 and redirected it towards Rout Lëns. Mischo rejects the criticism, saying the two real estate projects are independent of one another and that the municipality has not shifted any money from one to the other.
The former mayor places the Portal Eent saga alongside a number of other schemes still in limbo. Mischo cited the Maarthal project by Silverfinch, which had started to move but had then stalled.
Portal Eent, he said, had yet to materialise, while a Scholesch-Eck project was on standby, and another scheme to build a supermarket or convenience store on the former Maarthal site had also come to nothing. None of that, he argued, could be pinned on the City of Esch, on him as mayor at the time, nor on his successor Christian Weis.
On his LinkedIn profile, Fritsch addresses Esch's local politicians directly, referring, among other things, to the embezzlement of money, favouritism, and corruption. Mischo did not want to comment on that.
Current Mayor Christian Weis, for his part, is not commenting on the affair at this stage. In writing, he explained that the college of aldermen would first have to appoint a lawyer, and only once counsel takes on the file will the City of Esch be able to see all the documents and form a complete picture.
Only then, he added, would the municipality speak publicly.
