MMag. Patrick Siebert

0.001% TAX A junior auditor at @PwC in Luxembourg is getting ready to leave his job. Before he goes he goes looking for some training documents to take with him. Instead he finds a folder that anyone in the company could open. No password. No warning. Just sitting there. Inside are hundreds of secret deals between the Luxembourg government and some of the biggest companies on the planet. Deals that let them pay next to nothing in tax. His name is Antoine Deltour. He copies 30,000 pages. That is the whole story. He copies a folder. Let me explain what was actually in it, because this is where it gets interesting. Between 2002 and 2010, PwC alone helped broker 548 of these secret tax agreements, known as tax rulings, for over 340 companies. Apple. Ikea. Pepsi. Disney. Deutsche Bank. AIG. Koch Industries. Skype. GlaxoSmithKline. Coach. Abbott Laboratories. Household names, every one of them. The trick was simple. Companies moved profits through Luxembourg shell structures and Luxembourg quietly agreed in writing to look the other way on tax. Some of these companies ended up paying an effective tax rate under 1 percent. In some cases as low as 0.001 percent. On billions of dollars. Who was running Luxembourg for almost 20 years while this machine was built and protected? Jean-Claude Juncker, Prime Minister of Luxembourg until 2013. Deltour did not leak straight to the world. In 2012 he passed the documents to French journalist Edouard Perrin, who used them for a TV documentary. PwC noticed and filed a complaint with the Luxembourg courts. Then in November 2014, ICIJ @ICIJorg pulled together over 80 journalists across more than 30 media outlets in 26 countries and published the full scale of it as LuxLeaks. The timing could not have been worse for Juncker, or depending how you look at it, could not have been better. He had just been elected President of the European Commission days before the story broke. The man who ran the tax haven for two decades was now running Europe. A month later ICIJ dropped LuxLeaks 2, showing the other Big 4 accounting firms Deloitte, EY and KPMG were running the exact same playbook. This was never one bad apple. It was standard practice. Juncker faced a no confidence vote in the European Parliament over it. He survived. Deltour was not so lucky. December 2014, Luxembourg charges him with theft, violation of trade secrecy and fraudulent access to a computer system. He is facing up to 5 years in prison and a fine of 1,250,000 euros. For opening an unlocked folder on his way out the door. April 2016, the criminal trial. Deltour and his colleague Raphael Halet, another former PwC employee who leaked a second batch of documents, are both convicted. Deltour gets 12 months suspended and a 1,500 euro fine. Perrin the journalist is acquitted. Deltour appeals. Loses. Appeals again. Finally in May 2018 the Luxembourg Court of Appeal fully recognises him as a genuine whistleblower under European Court of Human Rights standards and acquits him completely. Halet's fight took even longer. He lost his Luxembourg appeals and only won at the European Court of Human Rights Grand Chamber in 2023, nearly a decade after he first spoke up. The European Commission that Juncker went on to lead never opened a single formal investigation into a single LuxLeaks tax ruling. Not one. It did chase Starbucks, Fiat and Amazon over separate deals, but the mountain of paperwork Deltour handed over sat there untouched. So that is the LuxLeaks story. Build a tax avoidance machine for 20 years and get promoted to run the continent. Copy the evidence of it and spend most of a decade fighting to stay out of prison. @BBCNews · @ICIJorg · @Reuters · @lemondefr and others.