Photo: fs999

With whom was the contract, through which millions in aid money from the Luxembourg state are flowing, actually concluded?

You know the feeling: you want to order a pizza in a restaurant, your favorite pizza, basically the only pizza you’ve ever eaten. You already have the image of the pizza in front of your eyes, the smell in your nose and the taste in your mouth - you’ve already eaten this pizza so many times. Since you have to wait, you look at the restaurant’s map and realize: it’s nowhere to be found, that pizza doesn’t exist at all.

This is exactly what has been happening for years to those who want to find out more about the traditional company „RTL Luxembourg“. This brand is present everywhere: it is mentioned on the radio, it is represented on social media, it holds copyrights to photos and it even has its own CEO in the Paperjam directory. But if you look in the official trade register, RTL Luxembourg is not to be found. Strange. Incidentally, this is also the case with employees of RTL Luxembourg who try to list their employer on LinkedIn. Jenny Fischbach, for example, apparently works in Neuilly-sur-Seine for the French RTL.

You can find out about this in the phone book. After RTL Luxembourg, in brackets, there is „CLT UfA S.A.“ CLT-UfA is an international corporation above which is „RTL Group.“ Further up the ladder, you find „Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA.“ In the other direction, you also come across other company names, under CLT-UfA there are a whole bunch of subsidiaries. In addition to foreign branches, there are also those that are well-known in this country. For example, there would be IP Luxembourg or BCE, which all belong to CLT-UfA or, like ENEX, at least partly belong to CLT-UfA. However, RTL Luxembourg is not included here either. There is therefore no independent company behind the country’s largest medium. Who would have thought that.

The question now naturally arises as to who the contract, through which millions in aid money from the Luxembourg state flow, was actually concluded with. Yes, probably also with CLT-UfA, a group that currently has a turnover of 5 billion a year. In effect, that is the case. The contract was not signed by RTL Luxembourg, but by CLT-UfA and even RTL Group. The Luxembourg state is thus compensating a deficit of one million for a group that makes a profit of over a billion a year.

RTL Télee Luxembourg, RTL Radio Luxembourg and RTL NewMedia Luxembourg are therefore at best something like small, loose production divisions within a large group. The personnel structure, finances, the infrastructure used as well as many other elements and even content overlap with other parts of CLT-UfA. It is therefore not clear here either what and who RTL Luxembourg is.

So to continue with our initial metaphor: The state has torn down the doors on Kirchberg, poured money in and hopes that it will somehow be burned somewhere so that our favorite pizza, RTL Luxembourg, can be baked.