They were sentenced Wednesday to suspended prison terms: 12 months for Deltour and nine months for Halet. Both men said they would appeal the verdict.
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The documents were originally used for a 2012 report by reporter Perrin on French public television but really exploded onto the world stage two years later with the huge “LuxLeaks” release of all 30,000 pages into the public domain.
The case was seen as a delicate balancing act for the judge between upholding Luxembourg’s strict secrecy laws and protecting whistleblowers.
Protestors supporting Antoine Deltour, Raphaël Halet and Édouard Perrin at the central courthouse in Luxembourg City on 29 June.
Prosecutors say this data and material supplied by Halet was used in the LuxLeaks revelations of November 2014 by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
William Bourdon, one of Deltour’s lawyers, called the verdict “scandalous”.
Over tfhe course of the trial the court heard how Deltour had copied 45,000 pages of documents to which he gained access through a glitch in the company’s servers, which had since been fixed. Perrin was charged in April 2015 over his role as “co-author, if not an accomplice, in the infractions committed by a former employee of PwC”, which prosecutors later clarified was Halet. “The information he disclosed was in the public interest”.
However, the tiny duchy of Luxembourg has also tried to show that it is clamping down on tax evasion, as well as diversifying into other forms of industry.
The court ruing takes place as the European Union gets ready to adopt a new law give such corporations new legal ammunition to prosecute journalists and news organizations publishing their internal documents and information. It is a real credit to our community in Luxembourg that we have not only weathered the storm, but have emerged as leaders in the global tax debate as well as retaining strong growth across the economy. For society at large, they were heroes, not villains.
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Two whistleblowers have been found guilty in the so-called “Luxleaks” tax scandal and given suspended sentences, while a journalist has been acquitted.
