Category: Luxleaks

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Luxleaks News

Opening of the “LuxLeaks” trial

Antoine Deltour’s trial will take place in Luxembourg from April 26th to May 4th

The Panama Papers recent publication has confirmed the major role played by offshore finance in diverting our democracies’ tax incomes. These revelations follow the LuxLeaks ones from November 2014, which would not have come out without Antoine Deltour’s crucial role. These revelations have led to a worldwide awareness raising on these issues. They have spurred the European institutions to follow up recently with measures towards more transparency and tax justice. Antoine Deltour’s support committee hopes his trial will also provide an opportunity to move towards an increased protection of whistleblowers, recognising their status as citizens acting for the general interest.

Courage Acting Director Sarah Harrison said,

Whilst publications like the Panama Papers and LuxLeaks releases get international news coverage, we must remember and support the brave people who take risks to make this information public. Without information, we have no chance at holding the powerful accountable. Antoine Detour should be protected and celebrated for bringing such important evidence of wrongdoing to light.

As soon as the trial starts, support committee members will actively remind the various signs of support received by Antoine: through the commitment of the 100 000 signatories of the petition, through the support of more than 280 French and international leading figures, through the more than 50 international civil society organizations which have expressed their gratefulness for Antoine’s altruistic action. Antoine has declared that he is “split between looking forwards to finally having the trial start and some apprehension over its conclusions.” He feels “boosted by the various signs of public support, as well as by the concrete consequences of the revelations.” According to Antoine, “the recent advancements towards fighting tax abuses confirm the general interest of [his] action.”

Over the whole period of the trial, the support committee will be present in Luxembourg to civilly remind those following it that the charges against Antoine are politically unfair and ethically unacceptable. Antoine worked from 2008 to 2010 as a junior financial auditor in the Luxembourg subsidiary of PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC), before quitting. He acknowledged having copied, during his notice period, hundreds of tax rulings between the Luxembourg tax authorities and multinational companies in view of reducing their taxes, sometimes towards less than 1% of their profit.

The LuxLeaks affair’s chronology is available on the support committee’s website.

Press contact:

Comité de soutien à Antoine Deltour
BP 1006
88050 EPINAL Cedex 9FRANCE
Email : contact@support-antoine.org
Twitter : @support_antoine
Facebook : Support Antoine

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Luxleaks News

Antoine Deltour’s LuxLeaks trial set for 26 April

Luxemburger Wort reports that Antoine Deltour, PricewaterhouseCoopers employee, along with another employee and French journalist Edouard Perrin, will be tried regarding the LuxLeaks scandal beginning on 26 April.

Deltour came forward in December 2014 as a source of the ICIJ’s Luxembourg release, saying, “I copied training documents, but while searching the PwC database, I also came across these famous tax rulings. Without any particular intention or precise plan, I copied these also because I was appalled by their content.”

Wort reports that the trial will last five days, and Deltour and the other unnamed employee will face charges of “robbery, professional confidentiality violations, laundering and fraudulent access to a database”, and Perrin will face charges as an accomplice.

Antoine’s support site is here. As of this writing, more than 60,000 people have signed a petition supporting protection, not penalty, for Deltour.

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Luxleaks News

Alleged LuxLeaks source Antoine Deltour comes forward, begins trial

Antoine Deltour a 28-year-old French national and former PricewaterhouseCoopers employee, has come forward as one of the alleged sources of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ (ICIJ) LuxLeaks release. Deltour went public in an interview with French newspaper Liberation on Sunday.

Deltour joined PricewaterhouseCoopers as an auditor in 2008, aged 22, and resigned two years later. Before leaving, he came across evidence of complex tax arrangements PwC negotiated for clients with the approval of Luxembourg’s authorities and made copies of them. As Deltour explained to Liberation:

I copied training documents, but while searching the PwC database, I also came across these famous tax rulings. Without any particular intention or precise plan, I copied these also because I was appalled by their content.

According to a new website set up by his support committee, Deltour was contacted by a journalist in summer 2011 and the copied documents formed the basis for several broadcasts on French television the following spring. PwC made a criminal complaint in June 2012, following the broadcast.

Over two years later, Deltour is one of the alleged sources of the ICIJ’s LuxLeaks. A first tranche of documents, released on 6 November, concerned tax avoidance negotiated by PwC with a second release this month broadened the scope of the investigation to the rest of the big four accountancy firms.

LuxLeaks follows another large tax-related investigation by the ICIJ, Offshore Leaks, which was based on a 260 GB hard drive posted anonymously to a journalist. Many of these records are now available online.

Tax avoidance has become a highly controversial issue in the EU, where people are facing consecutive years of reduced public spending under austerity budgets. LuxLeaks has proven to be particularly contentious in Brussels as the new head of the European Commission, Jean Claude Junker, was the prime minister of Luxembourg at the time critical elements in its tax regime were enacted. Junker now faces a vote of no-confidence and an inquiry into his involvement in systematic tax avoidance.

Deltour says he has not been involved with ICIJ directly and, in his Liberation interview, points out that some of the LuxLeaks documents are dated later than 2010.

I’m just part of a broader movement. In LuxLeaks 1 mentions several internal documents subsequent to my departure from PWC. I am not alone. In LuxLeaks 2 it comes to records controlled by the other members of the big four [of the financial audit]: Deloitte, KPMG, Ernst & Young.

It  is unfair that Luxembourg is the only country pilloried and that only  one audit firm is singled out because these practices are systemic. I do  not like the term tax optimization, it’s a euphemism for aggressive tax planning implemented by some states and complex strategies practiced at industrial scale by some firms. Regulation will always lag behind financial engineering.

Charged with theft, professional secrecy violations, trade sercecy violations and illegal acquisition of data, Deltour appeared before a judge on 12 December. Supporters are raising awareness about Deltour’s case. A petition for Deltour, who has garnered the support of a French coalition of NGOs Platform on Tax Havens and French judge Eva Joly, among others, has more than 2,000 signatures. As the supportive blog notes, Deltour could face prison time and a heavy fine.

We will report on further developments in Deltour’s trial as it unfolds.