On 16 July 2024, Caritas files a formal complaint after it discovered that €61 million had vanished into accounts in Spain. The shock is profound. But urgent decisions have to be made. The board of directors assumes control of crisis management. Just one week later, they lose their grip on the unfolding disaster.
What went wrong at the top of the organisation?
Listen to Episode 4 with English subtitles in the video below, or read the full transcript.
Léonardo Kahn Monday, 15 July, Six pm. At Caritas, the board of directors convenes for a regular meeting.
Nathalie Frisch Someone mentions a line of credit, to which we reply: Hang on, what line of credit? Like, where, what, how?
So the meeting was on the Monday, and it was made quite clear that we needed to know what was going on the very next day.
And that’s how it all came out.
Pia Oppel Do you remember where you were when you found out?
Nathalie Frisch The supermarket [laughs]. I was actually at the checkout when I got the phone call and was told, yeah, we’ve got a real problem. And the amounts I was being told about. I mean, there’s no way. It was a really surreal moment, yeah.
Pia Oppel Did you finish your...?
Nathalie Frisch I paid for my shopping, yes.
Then Tuesday we had another meeting. From then on, we had meetings all the time.
Léonardo Kahn On Tuesday, 16 July, the board of directors of Caritas takes charge of crisis management. This is the day the fraud comes to light after five months, during which 125 fraudulent overseas transfers are made. Helping a criminal network get their hands on €61 million.
Why didn’t the members of the board notice earlier that the organisation they were in charge of was in serious trouble? And what did they do to try and get the crisis under control in those early days?
My name is Léonardo Kahn and this is Scene Change, the 100.7 investigative podcast. Our second series of Scene Change is called The Caritas Affair. Join Jean-Claude Franck, Pia Oppel and myself as we chart the timeline of the scandal across eight episodes.
Episode 4: The Board.
Pia, Jean-Claude, by Tuesday, 16 July, the board of directors is aware that €61 million have been stolen from Caritas. What happens now?
Pia Oppel Essentially, this is the beginning of the end for Caritas. The board of directors tries to bring the situation under control. That’s their job during a crisis like this. But it doesn’t take long for things to get out of their control, because they no longer have much say in what happens to Caritas.
Nathalie Frisch Morning!
Jean-Claude Franck Morning!
Nathalie Frisch How’s it going?
Jean-Claude Franck Good, yourself?
Pia Oppel Morning, sorry, I’ve got cold hands.
Nathalie Frisch Don’t worry. This way.
Jean-Claude Franck We met up with Nathalie Frisch in her office to talk about the moment the board of directors was catapulted head-first into the crisis.
Jean-Claude Franck Here?
Nathalie Frisch Yep, do you want coffee?
Pia Oppel At seven pm on 16 July, the board of directors convenes a meeting that will last well into the night. Every single board member is present, including Nathalie Frisch.
Pia Oppel How did the board of directors approach their job here? As in, was there still some structure? Or was the atmosphere more one of general panic?
Nathalie Frisch I mean, there was already some structure.
Jean-Claude Franck If we want to be precise, we should actually talk about boards plural. Because when we say Caritas, we mean both the Foundation and Caritas Accueil et Solidarité.
Jean-Claude Franck But the two boards comprise essentially the same people and during the crisis, they hold joint meetings. So we won’t worry about the nuance.
Nathalie Frisch You didn’t really have time to panic because it was all just so surreal. It’s a bit like being in an accident. The pain takes a while to register, even though you’re already injured.
It felt a bit like that. As in, you’re aware of what’s going on, you can hear everything, but the real shock doesn’t set in until a bit later when you take a moment to consider all the repercussions.
Jean-Claude Franck As the crisis unfolded, Nathalie Frisch became the spokesperson for the Caritas board.
Nathalie Frisch Because I’m a lawyer by trade and so I already have some experience in crisis management and could help in terms of trying to sort the situation out somehow.
Pia Oppel It’s worth noting that the crisis at Caritas prompts a sort of power shift on the board of directors. Neither the President of the Foundation, Marie-Josée Jacobs, nor the President of Caritas Accueil et Solidarité, Pit Bouché, play much of a role in managing the crisis.
Jean-Claude Franck And so during those very first days of the crisis, Nathalie Frisch and two other lawyers take the helm on the board.
Nathalie Frisch So it was Philippe Sylvestre, Marc Hengen and I who were really the ones providing the input that was needed.
Léonardo Kahn What do we need to know about Nathalie Frisch and about the Caritas board more generally?
Jean-Claude Franck There’s a total of 14 people on the board of Caritas. It’s a voluntary role which they take on alongside their regular jobs. In simple terms, their job as members of the board is to make important decisions and ensure that the management actually implements them.
Pia Oppel The board is essentially made up of people with close ties to the Catholic Church or the Christian Social People’s Party (CSV). Not surprising for an organisation that was founded by the Church and whose board members are appointed by the diocese.
Jean-Claude Franck Nathalie Frisch fits that bill. She stood for the CSV in local elections in Hesperange. She describes herself as coming from a religious family. And says she identifies with the Caritas values.
Nathalie Frisch They’re good values, important values, and they can make a positive difference to society.
Pia Oppel So the board of directors is largely made up of people who see the role as a charitable endeavour that aligns with their values. And suddenly, on 16 July 2024, these people are confronted with the fact that the organisation they are responsible for has been robbed of €61 million.
Nathalie Frisch At which point you have to think, okay, what does that mean for it all? Is anything salvageable?
As soon as you start talking about these sorts of figures, especially for an NGO, if it were Google then you’d say, okay, not great but we’ll survive. But for us, it was obviously catastrophic, yes.
Léonardo Kahn What is the explanation initially given to board members as to what’s happened?
Pia Oppel The board is actually faced with a question that is still unanswered. Who stole the money?
Jean-Claude Franck And in the early days, the hypothesis was that it was the CFO herself. She’s out of the country when the fraud is uncovered.
Nathalie Frisch From the very beginning, none of it added up. Like, I don’t know, but I always imagine that if I’d helped myself to sixty million like that, then you’d say that a fairly normal reaction would be to eventually do a runner.
Pia Oppel During a board meeting just a few days later, it becomes clear that the CFO hasn’t made off with the money.
Jean-Claude Franck The atmosphere is tense.
Pia Oppel And then the CFO calls Marc Crochet on his mobile. She’s on holiday in the south of France and has just found out there is a criminal investigation ongoing.
Jean-Claude Franck Marc Crochet picks up. The entire board can hear what she’s saying.
CFO Marc, can you talk or not?
Marc Crochet Yes, I’m listening.
CFO That you’re buying a company, that a lawyer called me. Why can’t Maître Bûchet be reached anymore?
Jean-Claude Franck That recording was made by chance. Because someone’s always recording what goes on at board meetings so that a report can be written up.
Pia Oppel So the exchange between the CEO and his CFO ends up being recorded as well. And that recording was passed on to us.
CFO Marc, you’ve done me a dirty trick there.
Marc Crochet What are you talking about?
CFO Marc ...
Pia Oppel You can hear a man’s voice in the background here saying something to the CFO. A little later, Marc Crochet asks:
Marc Crochet Are there people around you?
CFO No, there’s no one around me.
Pia Oppel Marc Crochet keeps on trying to clarify the misunderstanding that is clearly going on here. Without success.
Marc Crochet I don’t understand. You’re talking about people I don’t know. About things I don’t know. About buying a company. What are you talking about? There’s €61 million missing from our coffers. You’ve drawn down lines of credit fir €33 million. That’s more than our organisations have ever possessed.
CFO You set me up. You set me up. You asked me to do all this.
Marc Crochet What? To steal money?
CFO I didn’t steal money? I only did what you asked me to. And you were on vacation.
Marc Crochet I was on vacation?
Jean-Claude Franck So the CFO says exactly what she’ll also tell the investigating judge. That she believed she was acting on the instructions of Marc Crochet.
CFO Marc, please. You tricked me.
Jean-Claude Franck The CFO keeps on repeating this sentence throughout the eight-minute phone call. How she comes to the conclusion that her boss has entrapped her remains unclear. The CFO doesn’t mention that if she was duped, then someone else must have done that.
Marc Crochet We can’t pay our salaries, we have no more money.
Jean-Claude Franck And then the CFO hangs up.
CFO Yes.
Léonardo Kahn So the entire board of directors listens along to this phone call live. How do members react to what they’ve heard?
Jean-Claude Franck They’re all pretty perplexed. No-one understands how it can be that the CFO fell for a scam for months without ever sounding the alarm.
Nathalie Frisch It’s so enormous that you say to yourself, for a case of CEO fraud it’s huge, it’s almost impossible. Besides, none of it added up. I mean, it wasn’t logical.
Pia Oppel But regardless of whether the CFO had indeed fallen for the scam or whether she was just acting shell-shocked during the call, Nathalie Frisch didn’t find her reaction unusual.
Nathalie Frisch The reaction didn’t surprise me because it’s the sort of thing we see all the time in criminal cases. Either you confess or you say, it wasn’t me, it was all the others.
Which is exactly what you then need to sort out. And the investigation has to be made, and then we’ll see what comes out when all is said and done.
Jean-Claude Franck Either way, the board of directors doesn’t have much time for speculation during those early days. There are far too many other things to sort out.
Léonardo Kahn Like what? What can the board actually do in a situation like this?
Jean-Claude Franck Priority number one at that first meeting on the Tuesday evening is seeing whether the stolen money can be recovered in any way. The board is supported by a lawyer, Rosario Grasso. He still remembers getting the phone call from Marc Crochet on 16 July.
Rosario Grasso I was driving to Esch for a meeting. Lallange, to be precise. And at one point I came to a stop. I parked the car when I found out how much money we were talking about. It was really tragic and quite dramatic because the scale of it was simply enormous.
Jean-Claude Franck Rosario Grasso’s priority is to get the prosecutor and the banks to pull out all the stops to try and reverse some of the transfers and to freeze the accounts in Spain.
Rosario Grasso Which they did the very next day.
Pia Oppel A quick recap. Starting in February, 125 fraudulent transfers were made to Spain from two Caritas accounts. €9 million was wired from BGL BNP Paribas, and €52 million from Spuerkeess. Going to a total of 14 accounts with Spanish bank BBVA.
Jean-Claude Franck The final transfers were made on 9 July, i.e. one week before the fraud is exposed. And Spuerkeess itself is also involved in the efforts to recall the transfers.
Pia Oppel Later on Tuesday evening, the CEO of Spuerkeess, Françoise Thoma, and her second-in-command, Aly Kohll, are brought in to a meeting with the board of directors.
Léonardo Kahn Can you tell us how you know that?
Jean-Claude Franck In addition to talking with the lawyer, Rosario Grasso, and with Nathalie Frisch, we also spoke to a number of other board members. We’ve also seen the minutes from the board meetings.
Léonardo Kahn So Spuerkeess is directly involved in managing the crisis.
Pia Oppel Exactly, as we mentioned previously, Caritas has been with Spuerkeess for decades. But their connection runs deeper than that. The CEO of Spuerkeess, Françoise Thoma, who is called in that evening, is intimately familiar with Caritas, having been on the board of the Foundation herself.
Jean-Claude Franck Two current members of the board, Gerd Brockhoff and Marc Entringer, also work for Spuerkeess.
Léonardo Kahn Doesn’t that help Caritas, then, in this crisis? Having such a good relationship with Spuerkeess?
Pia Oppel Not really, no. Because it quickly becomes clear that even the most recent transfers made from the Spuerkeess account can’t be reversed.
Jean-Claude Franck Basically, all the money that’s been wired to Spain has been long since moved to other countries.
Rosario Grasso Meaning that the people who did this, they know exactly what they’re doing. And the money that’s there is moved on immediately.
Léonardo Kahn So what does the board of directors do now to try and somehow get the situation under control?
Pia Oppel Well there’s another issue the board starts discussing on day one, and that’s the banks.
Jean-Claude Franck Caritas feels that the banks should have flagged these 125 fraudulent transfers to Spain. And that they shouldn’t have approved the lines of credit.
Pia Oppel And they’ve got a point. BGL let Caritas go overdrawn on one account by a full €21 million. And Spuerkeess approved a €10 million line of credit.
Jean-Claude Franck It becomes apparent pretty quickly that this is where Caritas and their banks part ways. On 18 July, i.e. two days after the fraud is uncovered, Gerd Brockhoff and Marc Entringer resign from the board of directors.
Léonardo Kahn But what exactly is Caritas accusing the banks of?
Pia Oppel Well, on the one hand that they failed to detect the fraudulent transfers. Which they ought to have done because they were unusual for Caritas.
Jean-Claude Franck The other grievance is that they approved lines of credit. While those lines of credit were signed off by 2 members of the management team, the board is arguing that they weren’t authorised to do that.
Léonardo Kahn What does that mean exactly?
Pia Oppel The board is arguing that the four members of the management team are only allowed to sign bank documents for day-to-day business.
Jean-Claude Franck Which lines of credit do not fall under, according to Nathalie Frisch.
Nathalie Frisch Those decisions had to pass through the board and you needed the signatures of board members, two board members, to even request a line of credit. Meaning that, in principle, those lines of credit shouldn’t exist in the first place.
Jean-Claude Franck The problem is, what exactly does day-to-day business mean at such a large organisation? Caritas didn’t have specific rules in place. There was no fixed maximum, beyond which a member of the board of directors also had to sign, for example.
Pia Oppel Plus, in May 2023, i.e. a year before the fraud, the board had decided that it was enough for two members of the management to sign documents. And not just for transfers and so on, for “all banking documents”. Which is not defined in any more detail.
Pia Oppel And when you look at the type of mandate the banks have issued as a result, it says right there that it can be used to take out lines of credit, that overdrafts can be opened, that unlimited sums can be withdrawn.
Nathalie Frisch I don’t think it should exist, personally. Like I said, it’s about the day-to-day business. Taking out a loan doesn’t fall under that.
Pia Oppel So Nathalie Frisch claims it was never the board’s intention to give the management team the authority to take out loans. Because that has nothing to do with day-to-day business. It seems, however, that Spuerkeess and BGL had a different reading of the resolution the board passed.
Jean-Claude Franck The banks declined to comment when we pressed them on their reasons for that.
Léonardo Kahn So there are several parts to the conflict between Caritas and their banks. The fact that the transfers weren’t flagged, that lines of credit were approved, and then also these very broad mandates. Is that a conflict that’s going to play out in the courts?
Pia Oppel That’s still unclear. It seems the hope is that an agreement can be reached without going to court. That the lines of credit don’t have to be repaid, for example.
Léonardo Kahn So in the initial days of the crisis, the board of directors is unable to clarify who stole the money or whether they can get any of it back. What else does the board need to sort out during this initial hectic phase?
Jean-Claude Franck Well another urgent matter is communication.
[Panorama jingle]
Sophie Schroeder Good evening, the charity sector has been rocked by a huge financial scandal. According to information obtained by radio 100.7, Caritas has fallen victim to a case of fraud which threatens to jeopardise its existence
Pia Oppel That was radio 100.7 breaking the story of the fraud on Friday 19 July 2024. Three days after the board of directors found out that €61 million hadLéonardo Kahn And what impact does the fraud becoming public knowledge have on how Caritas manages the crisis?
Pia Oppel For one, the more than 500 employees need to be brought up to speed. To prevent panic breaking out.
Jean-Claude Franck Caritas organises info events for its staff, including a joint one with a trade union:
Caritas employee We do what we can, but we’re exhausted…
Pia Oppel The board takes stock of the accounts. There’s still enough money to cover payroll for two, maybe three months. Around this time, the trade unions are getting worried about jobs, voicing their concerns on air with us.
Smail Suljic I am confident, however, that the government will take this seriously and do everything in its power to ensure that people can continue to be paid.
Pia Oppel At this point, the board is in close dialogue with the government. The minutes from the board meetings in those early days state more than once that the government wants to help Caritas and to provide financial support.
Jean-Claude Franck Nathalie Frisch rejects the idea that there was already a concrete rescue plan at that point.
Nathalie Frisch They’d said, OK, we’ll see what we can do. But they didn’t say they were going to save Caritas, no.
Jean-Claude Franck But were you more optimistic at that point that the state was willing to pull its weight?
Nathalie Frisch Personally, no.
Jean-Claude Franck And internally, they do in fact prepare themselves for the eventuality of there being no rescue plan. So now Caritas’ international partners have to also be informed that the money might run out very soon.
Léonardo Kahn How does that go exactly?
Pia Oppel The Director of the International Department, Michael Feit, notifies the partners Caritas works with across a dozen countries. His message is, there’s no more money, but please don’t panic.
Michael Feit On the ground, the panic could have resulted in looting, for example, or partners rushing to spend money on things that hadn’t been planned for. We couldn’t let any of that happen.
Jean-Claude Franck Their approach was to say that salaries and so on would be paid. But anything that wasn’t absolutely essential was going to be cut.
Michael Feit Buying firewood in Ukraine for the winter, which we do in July, August. We just told them, no, don’t place the order.
Pia Oppel But not all the decisions are quite that easy. We’ll look at how dramatic some of the consequences were on the ground in a later episode.
Léonardo Kahn So, part of the board’s crisis management plan involves internal and external communication. How successful are they?
Jean-Claude Franck Internally, they manage to stop people from panicking. Activities in Luxembourg continue as normal. Overseas activities are rolled back immediately, but even that is without incident initially.
Pia Oppel External communication is less successful. Marc Crochet gives radio 100.7 an interview on Monday, 22 July.
Marc Crochet We’re the people who trusted. The people who have committed the gravest errors are those of us who trusted others. If that’s something you have to go to prison for, then lock me up.
Jean-Claude Franck Marc Crochet’s statement prompts a lot of head-shaking, not just on the board but in government circles as well.
Léonardo Kahn Why?
Jean-Claude Franck Because it gives the impression that Caritas hasn’t acknowledged the gravity of the situation.
Pia Oppel At that point, it was clear that Marc Crochet had failed to spot the fraud for five whole months. The fact that the board then made him responsible for crisis communication did not go down well.
Jean-Claude Franck It was actually the President of Caritas, Marie-Josée Jacobs, who was meant to do that. But she doesn’t do public appearances. And internally she isn’t in charge of navigating the crisis.
Marie-Josée Jacobs I’m not sure I can answer all of your questions because I’ve been through the mill a fair bit and I don’t remember everything.
Jean-Claude Franck That was Marie-Josée Jacobs talking to us in December 2024 about her reasons for resigning from the board following the whole scandal.
Pia Oppel Multiple sources also told us that even before the financial scandal, the former CSV minister and long-time Caritas president had ceased to be fit for office on account of her age.
Jean-Claude Franck To the extent that discussions had been on-going for some time over who could replace her, but ultimately she remained at the head of the foundation.
Pia Oppel And then in July it becomes clear that there’s a problem, because information which the management had had for a long time hadn’t reached the board
Léonardo Kahn Do you know where the flow of information stops?
Jean-Claude Franck There’s one particular moment where it looks as if an important piece of information is not passed on. The Chief Operating Officer claims to have told Pit Bouché about the lines of credit.
Pia Oppel Which would put the Vice President of the Foundation in the frame. Pit Bouché himself declined to comment.
Jean-Claude Franck Nathalie Frisch says she didn’t know about any of it.
Nathalie Frisch I don’t know if lines of credit were discussed at a restaurant or what. Either way, there was never any mention of them at a board meeting. That much is clear. And the board never signed anything.
Pia Oppel But the problem was a more general one. The dialogue between management and the board had been deteriorating for months. With the result that the management team was facing ever less scrutiny.
Léonardo Kahn It sounds like it’s one blunder after another in this affair. What exactly were you able to find out about what went wrong?
Jean-Claude Franck So there was a group of four board members at Caritas who were responsible for remaining in close dialogue with the management team. That was the executive office of the board, also known as Bex, whose members included the presidents of the Foundation and of Accueil et Solidarité, Marie-Josée Jacobs and Pit Bouché.
Pia Oppel Bex’s main job was to make preparations for board meetings. But that’s exactly what they don’t do in July, for example. They should have been sounding the alarm about the lines of credit well before 15 July when the board was scheduled to have its next regular meeting.
Nathalie Frisch It’s fairly obvious that the board absolutely was not aware of everything that had happened. I mean, that much is evident. Why we weren’t aware, I can’t say.
Pia Oppel Nathalie Frisch made clear efforts here to draw fire away from the board of directors.
Jean-Claude Franck Which is not surprising. Because if board members had or ought to have had important information, then the question is what responsibility does the board bear for what happened at Caritas.
It’s an even more sensitive question for the members of the board because in those early days of the crisis, they discover that their roles are no longer insured for public liability. The CFO failed to renew the policy for the board members who are up in arms when they find out in July.
Pia Oppel Have you found out anything since then about what the reasoning might have been behind letting it expire, the insurance, is it possible somehow to retrace the thinking?
Nathalie Frisch I think it was a simple case of negligence, just so as to stop paying for things that weren’t urgently needed in order to divert money elsewhere.
Jean-Claude Franck This sort of policy is important for board members because they are personally liable if it can be demonstrated that they have failed to conduct proper oversight of the management, for example.
Nathalie Frisch What I can’t see at this point is how the board members could be held personally liable in this case. A board of directors has a certain mandate. As far as we can tell, the board did what it was meant to do.
Pia Oppel However, contrary to what Nathalie Frisch claims, it could well be that the banks see it differently, for example, and that they will make that argument in court.
Léonardo Kahn Meaning that in July it also becomes clear that there have long been a number of issues with the way the board operates. And who knows, if Bex had kept a slightly closer eye on the management team, perhaps the fraud would have been discovered sooner. Have I understood correctly?
Jean-Claude Franck Yes, so the impression we got during our investigation was that the board didn’t exactly have a close eye on what was happening day-to-day.
Pia Oppel Nathalie Frisch sees things differently, of course. She stresses that Caritas is the victim of a crime. And that if anyone at Caritas has done anything wrong, then that would be the CFO and the other members of the management team.
Jean-Claude Franck Are you then, as a director, accusing the management team of failing to pass on information which they should have given to the board?
Nathalie Frisch If there were problems, which clearly there were, then they should have been brought to the board of directors. And okay, if the management didn’t spot them, then that’s another problem altogether.
Jean-Claude Franck What Nathalie Frisch is getting at here is that other members of the management team also signed transfers and lines of credit, not just the CFO.
Léonardo Kahn But if that’s the case, can the board even continue working with the management team once the fraud has been exposed?
Pia Oppel So the CFO isn’t implicated from the beginning anymore anyway. She is initially on holiday and is then indicted by the prosecutor due to her role in the transfers to Spain.
Jean-Claude Franck Which prompts the board of directors to hire PriceWaterhouseCoopers to manage the finances.
Léonardo Kahn And what about the other three members of the management team?
Jean-Claude Franck That’s a different story. Marc Crochet, the COO and the Chief Human Resources Officer participate in the crisis management during the first week.
Pia Oppel The question of how to handle the fact that they might have also made mistakes is lurking in the background.
Nathalie Frisch We mustn’t forget, though, that across two entities there were 500 salaried staff and so many beneficiaries. So we couldn’t simply say, okay, tomorrow the entire management team is gone.
Jean-Claude Franck For some on the board, however, including Nathalie Frisch, it soon became clear that this wasn’t viable long term.
Nathalie Frisch I mean, it was clear to me from minute one that we were going to need a different set-up.
Pia Oppel The board, however, is unable to reach a consensus on this point so, for the time being, no decision is made.
Jean-Claude Franck That is, until the government steps in and says it cannot go on like this.
Luc Frieden We think that the management of Caritas, the people who manage the day-tp-day, they cannot be the ones we talk to. Because right now, we don’t know what went wrong with the execution of these transfers. Who authorised what? I cannot tell you that because we don’t know.
Jean-Claude Franck That was Luc Frieden speaking on Wednesday, 24 July. That is, exactly one week after the government was informed of the Caritas fraud.
Luc Frieden And for that reason, at this stage, we can only talk to the board.
Pia Oppel On the Wednesday when Luc Frieden makes this public statement, the board of directors holds a meeting which the PM and other ministers personally attend.
Jean-Claude Franck The management team is not present. What comes out of that meeting is that all four members of the management team are to be invited for a disciplinary hearing. That’s the first step an employer has to take before dismissing someone.
Pia Oppel The four members of the management team then come to the board and each of them presents a sick note, which puts a temporary stop on any dismissals.
Nathalie Frisch Essentially, we’ve been catapulted overnight from being a board of directors doing normal board stuff to being in a situation where we had to address operational matters.
Jean-Claude Franck So from 25 July, Caritas in practice no longer has a management team.
Pia Oppel So the consultancy firm PWC is hired not just to replace the CFO, but also to run general day-to-day operations as a whole.
Pia Oppel But managing the crisis is going to take more than that, the board itself needs a shake-up as well.
[Panorama jingle]
Pierre Reyland The board of directors at Caritas has set up a crisis committee in order to secure jobs and its charity work.
Léonardo Kahn A crisis committee, what is that and what does it mean exactly?
Jean-Claude Franck The crisis committee is simply a smaller group within the board of directors which is charged with managing the crisis. It means decisions can be made without the need for all board members to attend daily meetings.
Pia Oppel The members of the crisis committee are the three lawyers who sit on the board – Nathalie Frisch, Marc Hengen and Philippe Sylvestre. They all have jobs, so they can’t be managing the crisis at Caritas from dawn till dusk. The President, Marie-Josée Jacobs, is also a member, but she essentially doesn’t play a role.
Jean-Claude Franck So someone from outside is also brought on-board to be president of the crisis committee, Christian Billon.
Nathalie Frisch Basically, we needed someone else who could actually do a professional job, someone who was something of an all-rounder. They could then be the one to look through the finances, to manage the crisis, and so on.
Léonardo Kahn Christian Billon’s name was thrown around a fair bit in the media last year because of the Caritas affair, but could you explain briefly who he is exactly?
Pia Oppel Christian Billon spent many years working as a statutory auditor, notably starting out at PWC, the firm now assisting Caritas.
Jean-Claude Franck He’s in his early 70s and retired. He’s taken on the role of crisis manager for Caritas pro bono.
Pia Oppel He’s also been involved with the charity sector for a very long time. For several years, he was President of CNDS which runs the Abrigado drug consumption room in Luxembourg City.
Léonardo Kahn And what exactly is Christian Billon’s role now as President of the Caritas crisis committee?
Pia Oppel He’s been tasked with representing the interests of Caritas in the impending conversations with the government.
Jean-Claude Franck He’s also meant to ensure that Caritas’ activities can continue.
Pia Oppel But saving Caritas’ activities and saving Caritas itself are not necessarily the same thing. Especially since the activities are financed almost entirely by the state. And the government, for the time being, is not willing to give Caritas any money.
Luc Frieden We have no confidence and indeed cannot have any confidence in the current set-up. It is our job as the government to protect the state coffers. We are therefore withholding funds.
Jean-Claude Franck That was another important announcement which Luc Frieden made on 24 July.
Léonardo Kahn The Wednesday when the PM said that the government no longer has confidence in the management of Caritas, adding that Caritas would not be receiving any more funding until further notice. But Caritas and its activities cannot survive without government funding.
Jean-Claude Franck Exactly, certainly not after having €61 million stolen from them.
Pia Oppel And Nathalie Frisch says that she can understand their decision at that time.
Nathalie Frisch There’s this huge fraud. So in that first phase they pull you have to pull the plug abruptly and say, okay. Because firstly you need to take a look to see who was involved. That’s something you don’t know at that point. So it’s a perfectly logical decision to say, okay, enough.
Jean-Claude Franck What the board of directors didn’t understand were certain decisions taken after that. Some by the government, but also by the diocese who could have played a key role in defusing the situation at this point.
Pia Oppel Because the Cardinal was initially heavily involved. Even if he did pretend otherwise afterwards.
Nathalie Frisch I assume there might be a few other people behind the scenes who have perhaps said, are you aware of the consequences.
Because, I mean, his reaction was obvious, it was spontaneous, at the very least it wasn’t entirely thought through. To put it mildly.
Jean-Claude Franck Join us next episode to find out about the role of the Cardinal in this entire affair and the diocese’s choice not to help Caritas.
Léonardo Kahn All that to come in Episode 5 of The Caritas Affair. Thank you, Pia, thank you, Jean-Claude.
Pia Oppel Pleasure, Léo.
Jean-Claude Franck Thanks, until next time.
Léonardo Kahn You’ve been listening to Scene Change, the 100.7 investigative podcast. Scene Change is produced by Pia Oppel, Charlotte Bruneau, Tessy Troes and me, Léonardo Kahn. With additional help by Jean-Claude Franck, Yves Stephany, Semir Demic, Chris Zeien, Ana Angel and Jo Diseviscourt.
Sound and mixing: Sam Erpelding and Ingo Dumlich.
To make sure you never miss an episode, subscribe to Scene Change wherever you get your podcasts. And if you have any questions or want to give us feedback, drop us an e-mail at doku@100komma7.lu.
Translation: Rob Myatt and Pia Oppel.
