Antoine Deltour and Raphaël Halet, two ex-employees of PwC, an accounting firm, and Edouard Perrin, a French journalist, had been tried in Luxembourg for their role in leaking documents that revealed sweetheart tax deals the Grand Duchy had offered to dozens of multinationals. ..The whistle-blowers faced up to ten years behind bars. However, the prosecutor—perhaps sensitive to the strong public and, in some places, political support for them abroad—called for suspended sentences of 18 months. In the end the judge handed Messrs Deltour and Halet suspended sentences of 12 months and nine months, respectively. But a conviction is a conviction; Transparency International, an anti-corruption group, called it “appalling”. Mr Perrin, who had published an article that drew on the leaked documents, was acquitted.

The “LuxLeaks” affair has highlighted the role played by certain European Union countries, including Ireland and the Netherlands as well as Luxembourg, in facilitating tax avoidance. Luxembourg is not a typical tax haven levying no or minimal income tax; its statutory rate is 29%. Instead, it is a haven “by administrative practice”, argues Omri Marian of the University of California, Irvine, who has studied LuxLeaks in detail. Luxembourg’s tax authority in effect sold tax-avoidance services to large firms by rubber-stamping opaque arrangements that helped them to cut their tax bills dramatically in both their countries of residence and their countries of operation.]

Excerpt from Tax avoidance: Grand dodgy, Economist, July 2, 2016