The professional services firm said it remains determined to protect the confidentiality of clients in the wake of a case in which former employees were sentenced to suspended jail terms for leaking data in Luxembourg. A French journalist, meanwhile, was acquitted.

A court in Luxembourg has sentenced two former PricewaterhouseCoopers employees for suspended jail terms for their leak of data about Luxembourg tax arrangements with large corporations, raising questions about the role of “whistleblowers”. PwC said it remained determined to protect client confidentiality.

Antoine Deltour and Raphael Halet, both French citizens, received suspended sentences of 12 and nine months respectively, reports said. Deltour was also fined €1,500 ($1,665) while Halet was fined €1,000. Both said they would appeal. French television journalist Edouard Perrin, who used the leaked data for a broadcast made in 2012, was acquitted of all charges, according to Reuters and other news outlets.

"PwC Luxembourg acknowledges the decision of the Court and will analyse it within the coming days. PwC Luxembourg remains firmly committed to protect the confidentiality of its clients' documents and data. PwC Luxembourg stands by the advice it provided to its clients, all of which was given in accordance with applicable local and international tax laws and agreements and in accordance with the PwC Global Tax Code of Conduct, which has been in place since 2005," the firm said in a statement emailed to this publication today.

As reports said, the case shows the difficulty of upholding rules around financial privacy and enabling whistleblowers to alert authorities to suspected wrongdoing. It also shows how Luxembourg, a centre for private banking as well as registration hub for funds such as UCITs, had attracted the kind of hostile international attention that had mostly been focused on Switzerland beforehand. Luxembourg is a member state of the European Union.

One of Deltour's lawyers William Bourdon called the verdict "scandalous". The message of Luxembourg's justice system was for multinationals to "sleep tight", Reuters quoted the man as saying.
Over the 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. 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.

The prosecutor had requested 18-month prison sentences and fines, far less than the five-year maximum for the charges that range from violating secrecy laws to theft and IT fraud.
For Perrin the prosecutor had sought a fine, without specifying how high it should be.

The leaked documents showed that companies such as PepsiCo AIG and Deutsche Bank secured deals from the tiny European state to reduce their tax deals. What they did was not illegal, and defenders of such practices say that if policymakers are upset at such tax avoidance, it is up to lawmakers to introduce better laws, or to slash corporate taxes across the board. In the US, for example, its corporate tax rate of 40 per cent, almost double the global average (source: KPMG, 2016 data).