Sports Minister Martine Hansen spoke candidly before the Budget Control Committee at the Chamber on Monday afternoon. “The Memorandum of Understanding, as signed between the Ministry of Sports and the property developer for the sports museum, was wrong and clear mistakes were made”, she said, echoing the conclusions of a legal opinion commissioned by the Ministry of Sports following the resignation of former minister Mischo.
The sports museum had already been a point of discussion in the committee’s session last week, but with many questions still unanswered, Finance Minister Gilles Roth, Hansen, and Public Works Minister Yuriko Backes were called back before the committee on Monday to face further scrutiny from MPs. Roth and Hansen are both members of the Christian Social People’s Party (CSV), while Backes represents the Democratic Party (DP).
Roth told the committee that neither he nor his officials had been informed about the Memorandum of Understanding, and that he had only learned of its existence through the press. François Knaff, the official responsible at the Ministry of Sports, explained that the agreement had not been withheld deliberately, but had simply not been communicated due to what he described as ignorance.
Despite Monday’s committee meeting, a number of questions remain unresolved. Chief among them is how discussions of a conference centre suddenly came to replace the originally planned sports museum in the project’s scope. The role of several state bodies also remains to be clarified, including the relevant financial control authority and the Ministry of Finance’s Acquisition Committee.
