Dear AmChamMembers, Partners, Newsletter subscribers and Friends,
Welcome to issue 181 of your AmCham newsletter! We are delighted to have the opportunity to give you useful English language information and news about Luxembourg, with a special focus on international business community and expat issues of concern and interest. Enjoy reading and please know that we welcome your feedback, ideas and suggestions (Paul@amcham.lu)!
There are two specific items especially focused on the IT community which we want to mention to you.
Firstly, I want to shout out and compliment Serge Linckels the Managing Director of the Digital Learning Hub, for inviting me to attend a “Ask Me Anything” event at the University of Luxembourg in Belval featuring Sophie Viger the Managing Director of 42 Network. With a welcoming speech by Minister of Education, Claude Meisch, this was a very interesting event with students focusing on discussing their educational journey to become IT expert programmers.
This great event focused on motivating and information sharing between an audience of almost 150 students learning programming and educators managing the educational ecosystem where they were studying and learning.
Following Minister Meisch’s excellent motivational remarks, Mr. Linckels introduced Sophie Viger from Paris, who is the initiator driving force developing and implementing the global 42 Network which provide basic IT and specialized IT learning focused on students learning without teachers by themselves and in peer networks of fellow students. Mr. Linckels is the Luxembourg based civil servant educator running the Luxembourg affiliated students enrolled in the Luxembourg affiliate of this program. Ms. Viger is very passionate about what she is doing with her enthusiasm coming across strongly in her direct interaction with the large audience of attending students. The students themselves were happy to be self-studying and self-doing by themselves without actual teachers and also learning through group engagement.
Considering the shortage of digital tech skilled people in Luxembourg and the enthusiasm of the students of this program, I left the event impressed and with compliments for all involved.
We are also pleased to offer you a second interview with Angela Nickel, the Founder & Chief Executive Officer, COMO Group, operating COMO Digital life in Luxembourg. Ms. Nickel and her team are very dynamic, hardworking and smart, offering a new approach for doing business that is worth hearing about. Enjoy this article!
In other news of interest, this past week Stacey Feinberg, the US nominee to become Ambassador to Luxembourg appeared before the US Senate for her confirmation hearing session. I had the opportunity to join the confirmation session on-line and was impressed by how she very strongly and enthusiastically presented herself at the Senate committee hearing both via her personal introduction and via her responses during the question session. Ms. Feinberg plans to very strongly focus on business issues and this focus offers the potential for her to be a very impactful Ambassador, for the benefit of both Luxembourg and the United States. With the senate confirmation vote now scheduled to take place within a week, she likely will arrive in Luxembourg to present herself for accreditation to the Grand Duke upon his return from summer holiday in September. We in AmCham.lu are looking forward to her arrival in Luxembourg and will be very pleased to welcome and support her in her new role as the US Ambassador to Luxembourg!
I also take this opportunity to compliment our AmCham Tax Committee, and especially Tax Committee Chairman Bernard David from Deloitte for the excellent and extensively substantive Tax Committee analysis and recommendations report which they prepared and I co-signed before sending to the Ministry of Finance. My thanks to all of the experts working so hard in our Tax Committee to develop solutions benefiting you all.
On Monday 16th, we were pleased to join The Miami University represented by Ray Manes and a speech by the Mayor of Kansas City, Quinton Lucas, at the Banque de Luxembourg to tell us how he runs a city of 2.2 million inhabitants and the challenges associated to this. We were pleased to join.
As every week, we are pleased to offer to you a great recipe from Bibi Wintersdorf and her team. This week the offering is Feierstengszalot, cold marinated beef salad (Luxembourgish style). It looks like it will be a fun dish to prepare and a great meal to eat. Enjoy!
Also, as every week, Jorge has interesting news to share about our AmCham Member Benefits program. In these challenging times, we are very pleased to be offering to our member companies a generous number of membership cards in this MBC program which offers access to more than 250 companies each offering discounts and special deals to AmCham MBC card holders. A generous number of these MBC membership cards are available for free to each AmCham member company for distribution to employees and employee partners (with the number of FREE cards depending on the membership category of the company, or purchasable for 50 euro a piece). We are proud that this program helps promote good local companies while also helping employees buy the things they need at discounted prices! Please contact us if you want more information about this great program (Jorge@amcham.lu, Sonja@amcham.lu, Daniel@amcham.lu or Paul@amcham.lu)!
Last but not least, we still have a few last tickets left for the Gala dinner at the polo event on June 28th. If you wish to attend, please contact Daniel@amcham.lu
We are pleased to have 160 persons signed up to attend for far!
We wish you all well for these last several weeks before we all start our well deserved summer holiday period.
My respect and kindest regards,
Paul Schonenberg
Chairman and CEO
AmCham.lu