Hollywood mega-star Angelina Jolie will face fellow film star Brad Pitt in Luxembourg courts this autumn, in a fight over the ownership of a luxury wine estate in the Provence in the wake of their acrimonious divorce.
Once a power couple dubbed Brangelina, the two celebrities’ lawyers are now battling each other through a set of corporate proxies over control of the Château Miraval winery in the south of France, where the pair married in 2014, and which is estimated to be worth some $162 million.
Hundreds of workers marched into Luxembourg’s business district on Monday to protest management practices at national airline Luxair, where problems include the potential loss of contracts that employ hundreds and generated almost a quarter of last year’s revenue.
Talks between the company’s management, its unions and government officials including Transport Minister François Bausch resulted in agreement to restart seniority pay increases for workers and to stop putting about 60 workers on periodic reduced-pay leave beginning in January.
EU plans to scrutinize the environmental and human rights behaviour of companies will have a negligible impact in Luxembourg, home to an Israeli spyware company, a global porn empire and other controversial firms.
The EU’s due diligence directive for companies will only affect four out of every thousand firms in the Grand Duchy, critics said during a public debate last week, given that the law excludes small and mid-sized companies, and there is no national legislation to fill the hole.
The pandemic – and the broad rethink it has caused among workers of how many hours a day they want to while away at their jobs – may have left the pull of Luxembourg’s Big Four auditing and consulting firms untouched.
Lukas Eckhardt, a director at a Luxembourg asset management firm, noticed the expectations of people he hires has changed. He started at EY Luxembourg more than a decade ago, and spent three years working long hours before moving on to risk management jobs at other companies.
“Everybody was eager to perform. To really give weekends, long hours each day,” Eckhardt described his earlier days. “But I think this changed.”
Grapes are easy. They are fixed, to a stalk. But cherry tomatoes are an unruly lot. They scatter.
Supermarkets are trying to solve hundreds such quandaries, now that Luxembourg is about to ban plastic packaging for fruits and vegetables, introducing tougher rules than what the European Union mandates.
Gingerly, Cédric Gonnet lowers a bunch of grapes into a paper bag. They fit in snugly. For cherry tomatoes, the solution isn’t so obvious.
“We tried the same as with the grapes. The problem is that the customer puts them in the shopping cart, and they fall out… they go everywhere,” says the 48-year-old Frenchman, a director at the Delhaize supermarket chain.
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