About This Project: Luxembourg Leaks

The team and the goals behind this six-month investigative collaboration.

By ICIJ, Gerard Ryle, Marina Walker Guevara, Mar Cabra, Margot Williams, Michael Hudson, Hamish Boland-Rudder, Matthew Caruana Galizia, Rigoberto Carvajal, Emilia Díaz-Struck, Will Fitzgibbon, Cecile S. Gallego, Neil Chenoweth, Alain Lallemand, Kristof Clerix, Lars Bové, Fernando Rodrigues, Frédéric Zalac, Harvey Cashore, Minna Knus-Galán, Serge Michel, Frederik Obermaier, Bastian Obermayer, Harry Karanikas, Andras Petho, Uri Blau, Leo Sisti, Toshihiro Okuyama, Margo Smit, Yongjin Kim, Fredrik Laurin, Joachim Dyfvermark, Titus Plattner and Leslie Wayne

November 5, 2014

Luxembourg Leaks is a collaborative investigation that exposes for the first time on a global scale how Luxembourg works as a tax haven in the middle of Europe.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists collaborated with more than 80 reporters in 26 countries to analyze nearly 28,000 pages of leaked confidential documents that lay out the special tax deals granted by the government of Luxembourg to some of the world’s largest corporations.

These deals, called tax rulings, allow companies to drastically reduce taxes on profits they shift to Luxembourg – and to do so in secret. The European Commission is currently probing the legality of similar tax deals granted to Amazon and Fiat in Luxembourg as well as to other companies in Ireland and The Netherlands.

Some of the documents in the leak were reported in 2012 by French journalist Edouard Perrin for France 2 and by the BBC. But the majority of the files have never been examined before. They involve more than 340 companies with links to dozens of countries. They feature detailed and complex tax-savings plans prepared by accountants at PricewaterhouseCoopers on behalf of its corporate clients.

These arrangements are legal. The goal is to shift money from one part of a company to another through complicated hybrid financial instruments, drastically reducing taxable income.

To report the story ICIJ and its media partners around the world used data analysis, traditional shoe-leather reporting and online collaboration tools. Alongside the stories, we have published a searchable database where readers can explore the companies in the leak by industry and country and download the original documents.