Devenu un people comme les autres, le milliardaire de génie Mark Zuckerberg voit sa vie privée scrutée par le public. L’officialisation de sa relation pourrait donc se retrouver en Une des magazines.
«Mark Zuckerberg est maintenant en couple». Une petite phrase qui a fait beaucoup parler sur la planète Facebook. Le très ambitieux créateur du réseau social, s’est laissé prendre au jeu de l’amour sur Internet et a décidé de faire état de sa vie privée en public. Un choix surprenant pour celui que l’on range dans la catégorie des petits génies, plus habitués à caresser leur clavier que le corps d’une femme. Mais le printemps a visiblement ouvert les Windows de Mark à l’amour. L’heureuse élue s’appelle
Chan.
Si les deux e-tourtereaux viennent tout juste d’officialiser leur rencontre, il se fréquentent en réalité depuis 2003. Romantisme absolu: leur regards se sont pour la première fois croisés lors d’une soirée, alors qu’ils faisaient tous les deux la queue pour aller aux toilettes…La première impression de Priscilla fut que Mark était «un mec plutôt ringard, un peu ailleurs». Pas vraiment le coup de foudre dirons-nous. Mais à force de persévérance et de «pokes» en masse, Zuckerberg a finalement séduit sa belle.
Entre eux, c’est désormais l’e-mour fou! Mais pas question de dépasser certaines limites. Véritable accro au travail, peut-être même plus que le boss de Facebook, Priscilla a imposé quelques règles. Pas plus d’un rendez-vous par semaine, d’une durée de 100 minutes, ni dans l’appartement de Mark ni dans les bureaux de Facebook. Une décision drastique, qui laisse peu de place à l’improvisation, mais sûrement essentielle à la survie de ce couple qui travaille à quelques rues d’écart dans la ville de Palo Alto.
La relation entre Mark et Priscilla prenant de l’ampleur, ils se sont progressivement permis quelques petites folies. Non, pas de tatouage des prénoms respectifs sur l’épaule, mais quelques apparitions publiques ensemble. De quoi affoler les fans de Mark qui espéraient encore pouvoir séduire le plus jeune milliardaire de la planète, dont la fortune est estimée a 6,9 milliards de dollars. Sur ce point, on ne peut pas reprocher à Priscilla d’être vénale, puisqu’elle envoyait déjà des love-mails à Mark alors qu’il n’était que le geek de service à Harvard.
Geek aujourd’hui métamorphosé en prince charmant du web grâce à sa douce. Ils sont tellement amoureux, qu’ils n’ont pas hésité a créer une page Facebook pour leur bichon Beast. Le ridicule ne tue pas et donne des ailes à Mark et Priscilla. Ces deux-là sont donc officiellement, au yeux de la communauté Facebook, en couple (« in a relationship »). On leur souhaite beaucoup de bonheur, de pokes quotidiens, de cœurs sur leurs murs (walls) et de messages inbox enflammés.
In Sweden, the wolves are back. After nearly half a century on the brink of extinction, they have begun to thrive again and, as wolves do, cause havoc among the local populations of sheep and reindeer, not to mention household pets. Even a few humans have suffered injury. The government, which has been doing its best to foster repopulation, is struggling to reconcile competing interests – those of livestock farmers, wildlife managers and animal rights activists – while at the same time protecting the wolves’ own genetic sustainability, given the risks of inbreeding among a population of just over 400. It is a tricky and sometimes nasty business. Hunters hired for culling have reportedly received death threats, and the European Commission has reprimanded Sweden for violating EU norms on protected species.
Lena Ek, who inherited this demanding brief in September 2011 when she became environment minister, has shown admirable circumspection. She spearheaded the establishment of an inquiry into a sustainable national policy on predatory animals, the final report of which was tabled on 26 August, and staunchly defends Sweden’s track record. “There are few countries in the world that have more information about their big carnivores than Sweden does,” she argues, adding that Sweden has probably spent more money per individual animal than any other nation.
The wolves have, in one sense, done Ek a favour. The controversy has given her the ideal platform to demonstrate her predilection for openness, compromise, and what she describes as “teamwork”. She is, in fact, particularly well equipped to tackle such a quintessential conundrum posed by Mother Nature. She was born and raised on her parents’ dairy farm in south-eastern Sweden, where the values of hard work, family, and social responsibility were deeply inculcated. Her mother was one of the first women in Sweden to gain a degree in agriculture, but Ek chose to pursue a law degree. “I wanted an academic education…and something to do with society,” she says.
After completing a master’s degree in international public law in 1985, Ek worked as a teacher and researcher at Lund University. At the time Swedes were considering European Union membership, and Ek, who frequently travelled to Brussels for research, established a reputation as one of the country’s most authoritative voices on the European project. Thus the Centre Party, a century-old green social-liberal movement, sought her assistance, which she willingly consented to give – but, already balancing being a mother with her career, on condition that she was placed at the bottom of any election list. To her surprise, she gained so many personal votes that she was forced to reconsider her vocation. “If my neighbours trusted me, I had to keep to my word, and that’s when I became a part-time mayor,” she says. That was in Valdemarsvik, where she had moved with her husband to help him run his family farm.
In January 1995 Sweden joined the EU, and Ek immediately plunged into the nuts-and-bolts business of procuring funds for municipal and rural development. With her expertise in law now matched by growing familiarity with finance, her political capital increased. In 1998, the Centre Party asked her to run for the Riksdag – the national legislative assembly in Sweden.
Sensing that she might have doubts – she had indicated her intention to return to academic research – party leaders made sure she won a parliamentary seat by putting her at the top of the party list. Though the centrists ended up in opposition, Ek was chosen for the finance committee, where she homed in on what had been her top priority since the start of her career: children’s and women’s issues.
Her position in the Centre Party is solid. She is one of 18 members of the party’s executive board and retains strong ties with the party’s influential wing for women, Centerkvinnorna. Moreover, Ek is untainted by scancal – as opposed to Heidi Hautala in Finland – which is not unimportant given the Nordic political culture that often leads to resignations at the slightest hint of impropreity.
In 2004, an opening to become an MEP arose and this time Ek did not hesitate. The decision could not have been easy – she had four children by then, the youngest not yet at school. But Ek, having climbed the municipal, regional and national ladder, saw the European Parliament as a “real challenge” at the top level in the hierarchy of power. “I always wanted to come back to Brussels, so for me it was fantastic,” recalls Ek, who became a leading negotiator for the ALDE group on major legislation such as the Third Energy Package and Europe 2020. “Once you understand how the wheels turn, you can have a lot of influence, even if you represent a country with only nine million people.”
Curriculum Vitae
1958: Born, Mönsterås
1978-85: Master’s degree in law, Lund University
1985-92: Researcher and lecturer, Lund University
1993-98: Chair of Östergötland district, Centre Party
1994-98: Municipal commissioner, Valdermarsvik
1999-: Member of Riksdag
2004
2004-11: Member of European Parliament
2006-09: Chair of Sällskapet Politik & Näringsliv (Society of Politics and Industry)
2007-09: Chair of Swedish Brain Power
2008-11: Board member, Swedish Environment Institute
2011-: Minister of Environment
Legislative work in the Parliament brought her additional extensive expertise in environmental affairs. Nature was always at the heart of Ek’s concerns, and her intensive work on emissions trading and climate change brought her full circle. The needs of the family farm broadened into the needs of all Europeans. “It doesn’t matter how big the cities are, you still need the clean water, the clean air, and the clean soil,” says Ek, who loves to spend free time walking in the woods and identifying wildflowers. For her, human rights are vitally linked with the environment: “Often, when there is an environmental catastrophe, it’s the poorest and the weakest who are hit the hardest.”
Having hosted the first international climate conference in 1972, seen by many as the birth of the modern environmental movement, Swedes feel an instinctive need to remain trailblazers in recycling, biodiversity and emissions reduction.
Long-term, Sweden aims to reduce greenhouse emissions by 40 per cent by 2020, arrange a phosphorus-free fleet by 2030, and become a climate-neutral country by 2050. Ek is confident that these targets can be met. “The precautionary principal is, for me, the key to everything,” she says, adding that for her that is the cornerstone of Swedish environmental law. She sees her core task as getting everyone involved. Environmental policy shouldn’t be “the icing on the cake,” she says. “It should be in every layer of the cake to make it successful.”
The race is on to establish new trade rules and standards that will govern the “third wave” of globalisation
The French historian Fernand Braudel, in his seminal “Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme”, described how, even before the industrial revolution, shifting trade links shaped the development of the western economy between the 15th and 18th centuries. This was, he wrote, “modernity on the march”.
In our own time, for at least two decades now, western capitalism has been experiencing a dramatic reconfiguration in trade patterns, this time globally. Willem Buiter, chief cconomist of the American banking giant Citigroup, has described this trade-driven transformation as a “third wave of globalisation”.
A sign of these changed dynamics is that trade ministers from the European Union’s member states are being lined up (18 October) to give the European Commission a mandate to negotiate the first ever EU investment and market access deal with China, Europe’s second biggest trade partner.
The failure of the long-running Doha trade round of world talks – at best we are now looking at the possibility of a “Doha-lite” deal in Bali at the end of the year – is symptomatic of the passing of a period during which the dominant advanced economies of the transatlantic region could shape world trade rules to their needs. This was the era of the Kennedy (1964), Tokyo (1973) and Uruguay (1986) multilateral trade “rounds”, which were inclusive deals involving, by the end, more than one hundred of the globe’s trading nations.
Much of the pressure behind a new wave of deepening trade links surges out of emerging market economies, particularly in Asia. Buiter predicts that by 2030 these Asian countries will have a bigger share of world trade than western Europe.
Such rising trade powers as China, India, Brazil and Indonesia have been insisting on a bigger say in designing trade rules. Hence the proliferation of regional and one-on-one trade deals and the stalling of the Doha global trade round.
Last month (17 September) the European Parliament, which was given new trade powers by the EU’s Lisbon treaty, conditionally approved the opening of one-on-one talks with China.
An EU-level investment and market access agreement with China would replace the bilateral agreements that most individual member states currently have with China. It would tackle “behind the border” issues – including regulatory impediments prejudicial to foreign investors. These are important not least because of the expanding role of cross-border supply-chains and services, including financial services in international trade.
If the EU were to reach a bilateral deal with China it would be less far- reaching than, say, the comprehensive, “deep integration” free-trade deal between the EU and South Korea implemented in 2011.
That EU member states are prepared to pool their negotiating power to try to achieve their trade objectives with China at a time when “Europe” is so toxic to so many of their voters, especially in the United Kingdom, reflects new realities. Crucially, each recognises that China is already too powerful to negotiate with separately.
In July, the United States led the way with an announcement that China had agreed, for the first time, to open talks about a US-China Bilateral Investment Treaty. It would include China’s sensitive, but troubled, financial services sector.
That follows an American decision earlier this year to launch two so- called mega-regional free-trade talks, the Pacific Partnership Initiative, which involves over a dozen countries, but, specifically and significantly, excludes China, and the EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).
Klaus Deutsch, an economist at Deutsche Bank, has argued that with the Doha round faltering, as early as 2006, EU trade policymakers were forced onto the defensive. The EU had hoped, a decade ago, to use its clout as the world’s largest trade and investment power, to “assume leadership of the global trading system”, and so shape it on traditional, multilateral foundations, he argues. As Doha foundered these hopes were dashed.
Deutsch sees the EU/US TTIP as particularly significant. “Two of the three largest trade powers in the world [the third is China] are choosing to try to deepen their bilateral economic relations with the explicit aim of strengthening existing world trade rules, by creating new rules with a global scope, and, if possible, in a second step anchoring [their new rules] multilaterally in the World Trade Organisation,” he writes.
Put more bluntly, the US and the EU are trying, with as many of their allies and partners as possible, to beat China to the punch in establishing new trade rules and standards for the advancing “third wave” of globalisation.
The European Union Chamber of Commerce in China has just published a hard-hitting position paper about commercial relations between the EU and China.
A few minutes’ perusal are all that is needed to understand why European companies are so keen on an investment and market access deal with the Middle Kingdom.
Many European companies are frustrated by the Chinese government’s treatment of their operations in China – businesses in which they have invested more than €100 billion. Profits are falling and profit margins narrowing as discrimination against foreign investors remains entrenched.
The European Chamber’s report talks of the “vast contrast between market access for European companies in China and Chinese companies investing in Europe”, where Chinese corporate investment has risen sharply in the past few years to at least €15 billion.
The report highlights the pernicious conflicts of interest between the Chinese government’s role as a regulator and its role as the owner or major shareholder in many of the nation’s biggest companies. These “national champions” benefit from “a plethora of interventionist measures [which] often function in practice as protectionist measures”, the chamber complains.
State-owned enterprises “often yield high profits simply by relying on partisan treatment…their ability to suppress competition and their control over resources and monopoly positions in a range of non-public sectors”, the report observes.
It points out that regional or “local” champions also enjoy preferential treatment under local, industrial policies, which are often politically driven.
The state-controlled banking and “shadow” banking system is a particular problem, inefficient, badly managed and, along with local government financing vehicles, regarded by many as a catastrophe waiting to happen. China’s development policy has focused on channelling cheap funds to (often inefficient) government-dominated Chinese companies at the expense of Chinese consumers and foreign competitors.
It can be read as a plea to the reformist wing of a divided Chinese government to recognise that their national and global ambitions will be frustrated if they do not act.
The transatlantic partners must hope that, just as the Chinese government used its bid to join the World Trade Organization a decade ago to push through domestic economic reforms, the cadre of reformists amongst China’s leaders will use bilateral trade talks to undermine vested interests that are blocking vital changes.
Stewart Fleming is a freelance journalist based in London.
MEPs call for greater help to tackle human trafficking
MEPs’ reaction to the Lampedusa tragedy was split along ideological lines. Manfred Weber, a German MEP who is deputy leader of the centre-right group in the European Parliament, said that it highlighted the need for tougher action against people-traffickers and for more aid to countries of origin. But he also called on those countries to “take responsibility” for their citizens. All but one of the survivors of last week’s tragedy were from Eritrea, one of the world’s most repressive countries.
Hannes Swoboda, the leader of the centre-left group in the Parliament, agreed that countries of origin and of transit needed more aid. He also said that national laws criminalising those who help refugees had to be quashed. However, the EU has no competence to do so. Last week, the European Commission defended itself against claims that it should have acted against an Italian law that allows crews who rescue migrants in distress to be prosecuted for aiding illegal entry. A spokesman for Cecilia Malmström, the European commissioner for home affairs, said on Friday that it was “not for the Commission to have opinions on national laws covering national competences”.
Jean Lambert, a British Green MEP, slammed the “outpouring of rhetoric” from member states and political parties. “EU governments and politicians have consistently blocked attempts to ensure EU border policies can focus on saving lives at sea and deciding which countries take responsibility for those saved,” she said. “They have also failed to ensure that those seeking refuge can access asylum systems safely.”
MEPs will today (10 October) vote on operating rules for the Eurosur border-surveillance system, which allows member states to share real-time data on movements at the external borders.
Jan Mulder, a Dutch Liberal MEP who drafted the Parliament’s position on Eurosur, said that the system could help save lives.
Member states’ ambassadors to the European Union are today (18 July) likely to approve across-the-board cuts to the European Commission’s proposal for the EU’s budget for 2014.
The ambassadors’ political backing for the cuts would pave the way for the Council of Ministers to adopt its version of the next annual budget in a written procedure that ends on 2 September, without the need for a special meeting of national finance ministers, tentatively scheduled for 25 July.
The European Parliament will have 42 days from 2 September to come up with its version of the budget for 2014, the first year of the next multi-annual budget cycle (2014-20). The annual budget requires the backing of a weighted majority of member states and the approval of the Parliament. The first negotiations between MEPs and the Council have been scheduled for 16 October.
Difference of opinion
The Council’s draft version cuts the Commission’s proposal, made at the end of June, across all headings, albeit by modest amounts. The Council sets the EU’s commitments (undertakings to pay) at €141.77 billion, down from the €142.01bn proposed by the Commission, and payments (actual transfers of money) at €134.81bn, down from the Commission’s proposed €135.87bn.
The most severe cuts are to be made to cohesion payments, payments for growth and jobs programmes, and administration.
An official said that the reductions had been concentrated in programmes beset by problems over their performance in the past. In relative terms, the deepest cuts are to administration and foreign affairs.
The Parliament’s budget negotiators, led by Anne Jensen, a Danish Liberal, have already indicated that they will seek higher appropriations, to make full use of the maximum amounts permitted by the multi-annual financial framework.
Council officials argue that they had to reduce annual appropriations for 2014 to allow increased flexibility each year.
Budget experts from the member states reached agreement on the figures on Monday (15 July) on the basis of a proposal from Lithuania, the holder of the rotating presidency of the Council of Ministers. The Council’s position had to be discussed and agreed within a short period of time as the Commission’s proposal was made unusually late, on 26 June, because of delays in securing a political deal on the 2014-20 budget.
Commission argues that exceptional economic circumstances had not been met to justify changes in calculations of staff pay increases.
A legal opinion prepared for the European Court of Justice sides with the European Commission against the member states in a dispute over pay increases for European Union staff.
At issue is whether the Council of Ministers acted legally when it decided that exceptional economic circumstances justified not keeping to a formula previously agreed with staff unions for calculating annual pay increases.
According to Yves Bot, an advocate general of the court, the judges of the court should annul a decision of the Council of Ministers taken on 19 December 2011 to reject the Commission’s proposal for a pay increase of 1.7%. That proposal was based on a formula that uses the average of purchasing power of civil servants in a group of reference member states and an indexation for the cost of living in Brussels.
The Commission argued that although the EU’s rules did allow for the suspension of the pay formula in exceptional economic circumstances, those conditions had not been met, so it was legally obliged to stick to the formula and propose a pay increase.
The lawyer considered three cases that have been brought before the court, all concerning the mechanism for a pay increase. Various member states joined the legal actions in one or more of the cases to side with the Council of Ministers – the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom.
In two cases, the advocate general sides with the Commission against the member states.
The advocate general considers a third case should be ruled inadmissible.
The advocate general’s opinion, published today (12 September), is not binding on the judges of the court.
Extra funds needed to avert disruption of EU business.
The European Parliament has endorsed €2.7 billion in extra money for the European Union’s 2013 budget in order to avert disruption of EU business.
The budget top-up was approved today (24 October) with 428 votes in favour, 44 against and 76 abstentions.
The member states had backed the extra funds on Monday in an emergency procedure, and the European Commission issued a dramatic appeal to MEPs to schedule a special vote during this week’s plenary in Strasbourg, which ended today.
Many MEPs felt bullied by the request, but the Parliament’s budgets committee endorsed the extra money on Tuesday and a vote in plenary was scheduled for this morning.
Martin Schulz, the president of the Parliament, said after the vote: “I deeply regret that the impending cash shortfalls were not acted upon in an effective and swift manner by Commission and Council [of Ministers].”
“This is not the way the EU should operate – we cannot continue to muddle through from one budget crisis to another,” he said. “Rather, the EU needs a realistic and adequate budget which will guarantee that the EU can operate efficiently and would avoid the need for last-minute crisis decision-making.”
The budget top-up is a largely technical measure to make up for lower-than-projected revenue, primarily from value-added tax and excise duties.
Another Commission request, for €3.9bn in fresh contributions from the member states, is more controversial. The UK prevented the Council of Ministers from formally adopting the request earlier this month, forcing Lithuania, the current holder of the rotating presidency of the Council, to schedule an extraordinary meeting of ministers for foreign or European affairs on 30 October.
The Council’s hesitation to approve the €3.9bn prompted the Parliament to postpone a vote on the EU’s next multi-annual budget, for 2014-20, until the November plenary.
Giovanni La Via, a centre-right Italian who is the lead MEP on the 2013 budget, said that today’s decision “does not eliminate the need for fresh money to pay the bills already submitted by the member states, not to mention those coming up in November and December, which will inevitably affect the already tight 2014 budget”.
Negotiations on the 2014 budget begin today and under EU law must end on 13 November.
La Via said that the budget top-up “will allow the Commission to drive on for a short while, but at far from cruising speed”.
“We cannot go on filling gaps by creating others. I hope it is now clear to the Council that once you commit funds, you are then obliged to foot the bills.”
A sector-specific approach is needed future climate policies.
If Europe wants successful climate policies as well as successful industries, climate targets have to reflect the actual mitigation potential of individual sectors. This is not what they do today. There is a considerable difference between the European Commission’s medium- to long-term objectives and the realistic mitigation potential of individual industry sectors.
The European Commission’s ‘Roadmap for moving to a low-carbon economy in 2050’, for instance, postulates that by 2050 European industry’s carbon emissions should be 80%-95% lower than in 1990. Industries have been invited to draw their own sectoral roadmaps and find pathways leading to the 2050 objectives. This indicates a willingness on the part of lawmakers to enrich their concepts with the concrete facts of industrial reality. The question now is: how will the results be dealt with, especially in the forthcoming 2030 climate and energy package?
A study by the Boston Consulting Group, made by the European Steel Association Eurofer, found that the steel industry could reduce emissions by 15% in a scenario in which the best-available technologies are disseminated, best practice is shared throughout the sector and a larger share of steel is produced via recycling of scrap in electricity-based installations.
The study – the “Steel roadmap for a low-carbon Europe 2050” – containing these results has just been published. It presents detailed analyses of several abatement scenarios, looks into potential future breakthrough technologies for CO2 mitigation and scrutinises the technical and economic feasibility of each alternative carefully. The outcome is that the targets of the Commission’s roadmap to 2050 are far beyond the reach of the European steel industry. As a matter of fact, the sector will not even be able to meet the 2030 intermediate milestone of 43%-48% of the European Union’s emissions-trading scheme (ETS) mentioned in the Commission’s roadmap.
So, how will this be dealt with in the debate over 2030? Unilateral climate action along the mitigation path suggested by the Commission would have potentially devastating effects on the EU steel industry. And steel is not the only sector which cannot come up with the mitigation potential envisaged by the Commission. The ETS will not help, although some people see it is as a means to incentivise investments in low-carbon technology: carbon pricing alone will not bring about the breakthrough technologies necessary for the steel sector.
It seems clear that European climate policies cannot be a technology-free zone anymore. They will have to be sector-specific as well as technology-based. Mitigation potentials are not identical over the whole of European industry and technological preconditions vary. A new balance will have to be found between the incentives for CO2 mitigation and protection from CO2 costs that distort international competition. This will perhaps be a more difficult road than setting one unified, undifferentiated target. But it clearly is the way to go.
Gordon Moffat is the director-general of Eurofer, the European Steel Association.
The England international has fallen down the pecking order at Old Trafford and new agent Mino Raiola is set to facilitate a transfer this summer
Jesse Lingard is set to be sold by Manchester United this summer, with Goal learning that he has lost the confidence of manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.
Lingard has been relegated to a back-up role since the arrival of Bruno Fernandes in January while the loan move for Odion Ighalo has given the Norwegian another option across the front three.
That has meant that Lingard is now only considered for less important matches, such as last week’s FA Cup fifth-round win over Derby County.
More teams
The England international has recruited Mino Raiola as his new agent, which has made a move in the next transfer window far more likely.
The 27-year-old forward has a contract that runs until 2021 and little progress has been made on an extension. Raiola is also far from a popular figure at Old Trafford after his attempts to secure a move away for one of his other clients, Paul Pogba.
United are planning on bringing in at least one of Jadon Sancho, Jack Grealish and James Maddison in the summer as they anticipate the exit of Pogba to Real Madrid or Juventus.
If United plan to add another attacking midfielder and potentially another striker to the squad, that would force Lingard further down the pecking order and would make him a candidate to raise funds for the planned rebuild.
It is understood that Lingard regards himself as one of the best number 10s operating in European football, which is at odds with Solskjaer’s appraisal of the player.
Solskjaer has been underwhelmed by his performances on the pitch this season and there are questions over how he applies himself in training, leading to the manager demanding that he improves his work ethic and performances for the rest of the season.
If Lingard is unable to raise his game over the remainder of the campaign then it is assumed that he will be moved on, which would be facilitated by Raiola, an agent with some of the widest connections in European football. There is no indication of any strong interest from other clubs as yet.
Former Liverpool midfielder Emre Can claims he received “three” offers from Premier League clubs including Manchester United.
The Germany international had been out of favour this season at Juventus and speculation was rife that he could return to the Premier League with Man Utd.
Can eventually moved to Borussia Dortmund for €30m on deadline day in search of regular football.
However, the 26-year-old says he had the opportunity to move to Man Utd but didn’t consider it due to his “Liverpool past”.
Speaking to Kicker (via Sport Witness), Can said: “I had three Premier League offers alone, including one from Manchester United, but I didn’t think about that for a second because of my Liverpool past.
“I have always had an extreme sympathy for BVB. I wanted to go to a club for which I can be important, where I am needed. That is the case in Dortmund. Borussia is a good fit for me – and vice versa.”