Three people were scheduled to go on trial in Luxembourg yesterday over the so-called “LuxLeaks” scandal that exposed the country’s huge tax breaks for major international companies, with the issue riding high after the recent “Panama Papers” revelations.
Two former employees at services firm PwC, Antoine Deltour and Raphael Halet, and journalist Edouard Perrin face charges over the leaking of thousands of documents that exposed the scandal.
The LuxLeaks affair erupted in November 2014, exposing deals that saved firms including Apple, IKEA and Pepsi billions of dollars in taxes while European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker was Luxembourg’s prime minister.
The deals emerged after a series of global news outlets examined 28,000 pages of documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, revealing the full scale of the tax breaks won by 340 companies.
Ex-auditor Deltour is accused of stealing documents from the database of the accounting firm before he left in 2010, revealing business secrets, violation of professional secrets and money laundering.
The documents later became the basis of a story by Perrin on the state-owned France 2 TV station in 2012, but the story stayed under the international radar until the LuxLeaks document dump.
Perrin is charged with being an accomplice in all the offenses, while Halet, accused of being behind a separate leak, faces the same charges as Deltour. All three of the accused are French.
Tax campaigners were expected to demonstrate outside the court in Luxembourg yesterday at the start of the hearing.
The trial is expected to last until Wednesday next week.
Despite facing between five and 10 years in prison, Deltour insists he has no regrets.
“At first I was just an anonymous source, and then I found myself at the front of the stage,” Deltour told reporters at his home in eastern France on the eve of the trial.
European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who has launched tax inquiries into a number of firms including Amazon, has been invited to testify at the trial in Luxembourg.
“We are considering the answer,” a commission spokeswoman said on Monday.
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