Antoine deltour
Antoine Deltour is a researcher for the French national institute of statistics, INSEE. He was previously a senior auditor at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Luxembourg, when, in 2011, he copied the documents that set off the “LuxLeaks”, making public the details of over 300 multinational companies’ tax-avoidance schemes, including Amazon, Apple, IKEA and Pepsi. Luxembourg’s finance minister, Pierre Gramegna, described the leak as “the worst attack” his country had ever experienced. Gramegna was on the wrong side of history: Deltour was nominated for the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. More niche, but no less honorable : the trade magazine Tax Notes International also nominated him to be their “person of the year”. After 3 years of trial, in 2018, Deltour was fully recognized as a whistleblower as defined by the European Court of Human Rights, a status that allows individuals to violate certain obligations, such as business secrecy, if it serves the public interest.
