The "Luxleaks" affair will return to the European Court of Human Rights: the ECHR validated on Monday the request for a new hearing filed by the informant at the origin of this vast tax evasion scandal. The informant's first application had previously been rejected.
In May, the judicial arm of the Council of Europe stated that the Luxembourg judiciary had not violated the provisions of the European Convention on freedom of expression by fining Raphaël Halet.
The Frenchman, at the time employed by the Luxembourg-based consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), spoke to a journalist and exposed the "tax rulings", a practice that allowed many multinationals to benefit from very advantageous conditions granted by the Luxembourg tax authorities.
In October and December 2012, he provided 16 documents used by the journalist for the television programme "Cash Investigation", broadcast in June 2013 on the French television channel France 2.
Prosecuted in Luxembourg for disclosing tax documents of his employer's clients, Halet was fined €1,000 on appeal in 2014.
Halet, who wanted to be fully recognised as a whistleblower, appealed to the ECHR.
But on 11 May, the ECHR ruled against him, considering that the Luxembourg courts had "struck a fair balance" between the rights of his employer, PwC, and his freedom of expression.
The European judges considered that Raphaël Halet could be considered "a priori" as a whistleblower but found that the documents he had disclosed "were not of sufficient interest for him to be acquitted", as the Luxembourg Court of Appeal had also "carefully examined" the case.
The "relatively moderate" fine did not "produce a real deterrent effect on the exercise of the applicant's freedom or that of other employees", the ECHR concluded.
Halet, who wanted to plead his case at a new hearing before the pan-European judges, requested "on 18 June (...) the referral of the case to the Grand Chamber", the ECHR's supreme court, which will therefore re-examine the case, the Court announced in a statement.
