Before the Panama Papers, LuxLeaks was the biggest leak in history. Now, two former employees of accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, Antoine Deltour and Raphael Halet, and a journalist, Edouard Perrin, (all three French citizens) are being tried in Luxembourg over the scandal which exposed the country’s enormous tax breaks to international corporations.
In 2014, the leaks showed that while European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker (pictured above) was Luxembourg’s prime minister, the country was making deals that saved corporations like Apple, IKEA and Pepsi billions of dollars worth of taxes. It had led to calls for his resignation.
“At first I was just an anonymous source, and then I found myself at the front of the stage,” Deltour said to AFP, insisting that he regrets nothing, even though he could be imprisoned for 5 to 10 years. He faces charges of “domestic theft, violation of professional secrecy, violation of business secrets, laundering and fraudulent access to a system of automatic data treatment” – all for passing information to the journalist who first broke the story.
The Panama Papers and the Luxleaks have forced European regulators to take a harsher stance against tax-dodging corporations. European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager was invited to testify at the trial for her role in making tax inquiries into firms like Amazon, which led to the recovery of about 30 million euros in back taxes from Starbucks and Fiat Chrysler, though a spokesperson for the Commission said that they are still considering their response.
The prosecution of these three whistleblowers has led to public outcry.
“Deltour should be protected and commended, not prosecuted. The information he disclosed was in the public interest,” said the Managing Director of Transparency International, Cobus de Swardt.
Oxfam has said that the whistleblowers should be “celebrated and not prosecuted.”
“It’s only through the courageous actions of individuals like Antoine Deltour that the public is alerted to tax abuse, which costs countries — including very poor ones — billions of dollars every year,” said Oxfam spokesman Max Lawson.
“The court case against them is a farce. They acted in the public interest, and deserve protection from prosecution,” said Tove Maria Ryding, activist organisation Eurodad’s tax coordinator.
“Shutting off whistle-blowers, without whom we would not even be talking about cracking down on tax avoidance, would be immensely harmful to the public campaign for tax justice,” said a German member of the European Parliament, Fabio de Masi.
“If they are found guilty, and potentially even sentenced to prison, this could have enormous effects in Luxembourg and beyond,” he said.
While the blame for the leaks are aimed at Luxemburg, EU Parliament member Sven Giegold notes that “the name LuxLeaks is a bit misleading” as it has revealed “a European system of sweetheart deals, and an ignorance toward existing legislation to exchange such information. They were not specifically about Luxembourg.”
Sources: BBC, Bangkok Post, Bloomberg
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