Following the LuxLeaks whistle-blowing affair that emerged in early November 2014, three people will go on trial tomorrow in Luxembourg.
Two former PwC Luxembourg employees, Antoine Deltour (who left the company in 2010) and Raphael Halet, are charged with taking confidential documents from their employer, and a French journalist, Eduard Perrin, is charged with publishing the information, in collaboration with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).
The documents - almost 30,000 pages in total - in the LuxLeaks affair centred around the practice of 300+ companies meeting with the Luxembourg tax authorities and establishing their tax liabilities in advance, based on the adoption of particular intitiatives which offered specific tax breaks. It transpired that no laws were broken by doing so, and the practice was also followed in many other countries too. The companies listed included many of the world's largest corporations.
The criminal trial is expected to last between one and two weeks; if found guilty, Antoine Deltour could face 5-10 years behind bars. PwC Luxembourg has also initiated civil proceedings.
