Luxembourg Court Sets Aside Whistleblower's Conviction

PwC sought jail for its employees and a fine for journalist who spilled beans on tax avoidance

ON MAY 15 THE LUXEMBOURG Court of Appeal finally set aside PricewaterhouseCoop-ers (PwC) employee Antoine Deltour’s 2016 theft conviction for having leaked the international audit firm’s client files – 28,000 pages of tax files – that precipitated the so-called LuxLeaks scandal.

The court found that in terms of European Union laws, he was protected from prosecution as he qualified as a legitimate whistleblower in the public interest

The document leak exposed the shocking extent of tax avoidance practices in Luxembourg used by scores of major multinational corporations to avoid tax and precipitated an EU-wide scandal in 2014.

But it was not Amazon, Pepsi, McDonalds, Deutsche Bank, Ikea, energy provider EON, Apple, Heinz, FedEx, Disney, or any of the other 330-odd multinational corporations that managed to secure huge tax breaks worth billions of Euros in Luxembourg, that were put on trial.

Nor was it the politicians that have promoted such activities for decades, or the tax official Marius Kohl at whose desk the bulk of these sweetheart “tax rulings” were dispensed.

Instead, in April 2016, Deltour, his colleague Raphaël Halet and journalist Édouard Perrin were put on trial in the Grand Duchy’s high court, charged with theft, illegally accessing a computer database and passing on “trade secrets”, as well as aiding and abetting those acts.

According to Luxembourg law, the three faced up to ten years in prison. The prosecution wanted 18-month jail sentences for the PwC whistleblowers and a fine for journalist Perrin.