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Martin Atkin

03 May 2017 09:13:38

As Antoine Deltour and Raphaël Halet - better known as the Luxleaks whistleblowers - prepare for the next legal battle to clear their names, it’s worth remembering that it was only thanks to the much-vilified “mainstream media” that the tax avoidance scandal was exposed. Leaked documents do not make a story by themselves - it also takes independent, determined journalism. The two former PwC employees are appealing against revised sentences handed down by a Luxembourg court for their part in exposing how multinational corporations used secret tax deals with the Grand Duchy to dodge taxes around the world. Although the court reduced their original punishments, the pair are fighting to clear their names altogether. But the whistleblowers deserve praise – not punishment. They were prosecuted ...

Lotta Staffans

27 May 2016 10:55:29

This week, European Union finance ministers agreed to establish a common EU blacklist of so-called “non-cooperative jurisdictions” – in other words, tax havens. With one tax scandal unfolding after the other, listing and sanctioning tax havens may seem like a good solution. However, as tempting as it may sound, this EU exercise is doomed to fail – and here’s why. The proposal for a common blacklist stems from the European Commission’s external strategy on tax, which was published this January. However, tax havens are not an external matter to the EU, quite the contrary – some of the world’s most powerful tax havens are to be found in Europe. For example, a new report from Oxfam uses European Commission (EC) data to analyse the role of the Netherlands as ...