At a two-hour press conference carefully staged by his consulting firm “Apollo Strategists”, which specializes in crisis communication and reputation management, in the Cercle Cité on the place d’Armes, orthopedic surgeon Philippe Wilmes, who was suspended for operations for another 21 months by CSV Health Minister Martine Deprez this week, let the cat out of the bag on Friday afternoon and provided details of the conspiracy of which he believes he is the victim. Wilmes said he didn’t just know Martine Deprez “indirectly,” as she made clear after the meeting of the parliamentary health committee on Wednesday. He had an 18-month “working relationship” with the Minister of Health, and since the beginning of 2024 they had met regularly, went out to eat together at the “Parc Le’h” restaurant in Dudelange, where Martine Deprez lives, frequently exchanged text messages and made a lot of phone calls.
In December 2024, on their behalf, he carried out a “brainstorming session” with “a number of actors” from the health sector in order to create a strategy paper for the implementation of the health policy reforms set out in the coalition agreement, said Wilmes, who, as a DP member, helped to develop the chapter on health policy during the coalition negotiations in October 2023. However, the working group never received any real feedback on their paper, so in the spring of 2025 the feeling arose that the reforms might not be politically desirable. This was mainly about outsourcing activities from hospitals to the outpatient sector. However, the minister rejected this on the grounds that there were no standards for this. The former vice president of the AMMD reported that he then sent these to the minister, but at some point the talks between them stalled, so that he personally had the feeling that the government lacked the political will to implement its promises. The current AMMD President Chris Roller justified the medical association’s decision not to sign the new convention with the CNS with similar arguments in recent weeks.
“My two rumors”
As a result, rumors circulated in the summer that there would be a government reshuffle, in which not only CSV Labor Minister Georges Mischo, but also Health Minister Martine Deprez would be replaced. “Those were just rumors, a lot of them, that were very specific discussions that were going to come out of the world,” said the brother of CSV Environment Minister Serge Wilmes on Friday. Pressure within the government also arose because “the coalition partner was not happy” that the promises from the coalition agreement were not being implemented.
On September 13th, Martine Deprez was heavily criticized at a government meeting in Senningen because of the policy that she “didn’t do, or because of everything (…), she didn’t do it”. The day before, she wrote to him in a text message that she had taken a three-week break in August and hadn’t gotten around to writing to him yet, “a lot of information comes, then ass jo probably lech lo och net mei néideg,” Wilmes read out.
He then suggested that she have a clarifying conversation, which took place on October 1st at 7:30 a.m. in her office in the ministry. This resulted in a “relatively heated discussion” about “the failures that had existed up to this point”, “the fact that the party had an interest in the leadership, that the government had meaning, that the six virgeholl haten, that nothing was wrong”. He confronted the Minister of Health with the fact that what was criticized during the election campaign had not been recognized by her as worthy of change and that the “Ouverture from Spideeler out, with medicine at d’Dokteschpraxen” currently had no perspective. She only made excuses and shifted the blame onto others, so that Wilmes got the impression that the minister had “nullement d’intentioun, fir iergendeppes vun dem governmental agreement.” At the end of this conversation, he told Martine Deprez that he was of the opinion that she was not implementing the coalition agreement because “that was a problem”.
Whistleblowers
On October 12th, in a letter to CSV Prime Minister Luc Frieden, he came to the conclusion: “The coalition agreement cannot be implemented on the basis of a fundamental ban on blockage, which has not been taken care of. It can’t and will not work,” the orthopedic surgeon read at the press conference.
Philippe Wilmes did not discuss the role played in these discussions by his plans to open an extremely controversial private clinic on Findel together with the former AMMD president Alain Schmit and the investors Marc Giorgetti, Alain Kinsch, Marc Hoffmann and Felix Retter. There is no doubt that the “Ouverture from Spideeler out, with medicine at the Dokteschpraxen” would play into their hands.
In any case, Wilmes “factually” stated on October 27th that a “Confrère” as an anonymous whistleblower had forwarded two files to the “Collège médical”: about patients he had seen at the beginning of the year, but suddenly it had become “so bad” that there was suddenly a need for action. In his opinion, this was how the conspiracy against him began. According to Wilmes, the whistleblower was the HRS orthopedist Marc Kayser. A month and a half later, Professor Romain Seil from the CHL followed suit, who wrote “seng entirely Ekipp mat op de Pabeier”. Seil was his “mentor” for a long time, but in 2010 there was a break between them because of “different views on medicine,” Wilmes said on Friday. A few days after these doctors forwarded the allegations against Wilmes of having carried out operations on healthy knees to the “Collége médical”, the medical college informed the Minister of Health. In mid-January, it referred additional cases to Martine Deprez, who imposed the first, three-month suspension on Wilmes on January 22.
How exactly Martine Deprez, Marc Kayser, Romain Seil and the “Collége médical” built this conspiracy is not clear from Wilmes’ story. But part of this is also the experts who last week also stated in their report required by law in such cases that Wilmes had carried out unnecessary operations on healthy knees in ten cases and thus caused “mutilations”. Wilmes repeatedly accused the experts Elvire Servien from Lyon and Alain Blum from Nancy of having connections to Romain Seil and the orthopedic surgeon Jacques Hummer from Nancy, whom he himself called, was “not a doctor, I don’t know him,” and they had chosen “Michel Platini’s doctor” simply because of his reputation, said Wilmes’ lawyer François Prum, who was connected via video. In any case, none of them completed their mission.
To support this claim, Philippe Wilmes invited “meng Associéen” Jacques Mehlen and Bernd Garbrecht, both orthopedists at the “Hôpitaux Robert Schuman”, who had terminated Wilmes over a month ago after having their own expertise carried out. Robert Huberty, team doctor for the Luxembourg national football team until ten years ago, also came. Wilmes was in training with him as an assistant doctor. They all criticized the fact that the French experts had made their judgment solely on the basis of IRM studies. However, in order to adequately assess a case, the overall picture would be needed, which also included the patient’s history and arthroscopy. Wilmes explained that in order to make diagnoses in specific cases such as chronically injured cruciate ligaments, one must know how to read IRM images correctly, which is sometimes a major challenge for radiologists.
100 percent
Garbrecht certified that Wilmes was a “high-profile, extremely competent” orthopedic surgeon, and Mehlen said that during his years of collaboration he had never noticed anything that was illegal. Robert Huberty said he himself analyzed five of the ten cases examined by the French experts and found nothing unusual. Last but not least, Wilmes invited a 21-year-old high-performance athlete to the press conference, whose file was also one of the ten examined by the experts. She reported that she had been operated on the meniscus several times by other doctors without any results; it was only after the cruciate ligament operation by Philippe Wilmes that she began to feel better. Four months after the operation, she still had pain, but it was completely different than before, so one could not speak of “mutilation” in her case, said the young woman.
In the next few months, Philippe Wilmes will have to answer before the “Collège médical” in 27 cases of knee operations and for alleged violations of the doctors’ deontology code. The country reported on Friday that the “patient distribution” had a further 71 dossiers from patients who had contacted them. The only legal option left is to challenge Philippe Wilmes’ suspension before the administrative court, said François Prum. In addition, they want to have a very specific counter-expertise prepared in order to convince the authorities that the French experts’ report is too one-sided. “The doctor Wilmes still had 100 percent of the opinion that he had operated on both Keier and Gesond Kräizband,” said Prum. Therefore, his excitement and his unacceptance of the expertise should be understood. “Then he understood better that it was very easy to see, maybe, how could it make sense that it would still be okay?”
