La directive européenne "secret d'affaires" face aux lanceurs d'alertes dans le cadre de la divulgation d'informations fiscales : protection de la légalité et de la moralité

Abstract

On April 14th 2016, the European Parliament adopted with a large majority the so-called “Trade Secrets” directive which is supposed to improve the protection around business knowhow and secret information against stealing and leaking. Concretely, this directive standardizes the European landscape about intellectual property which used to be very irregular from a member state to another. Thanks to the directive, companies which are victims of theft will now have an easier way to obtain compensation in front of a court. As we can understand, the business world quite well received this new legislation. Nevertheless, it also raised questions and disagreement amongst others’ society groups such as journalists and Greens’ politicians. Indeed, in a European environment full of scandals (LuxLeaks, SwissLeaks, Panama Papers, Bahamas Papers, etc.) the public opinion is starting to express its doubts about the status that will remain for whistleblowers. They are afraid that this Trade Secrets directive might facilitate legal proceedings against them. However, the text has been voted at the European level and the member states now have two years to transpose it into their own law but we can already try to figure out what will happen for whistleblowers. It is even more interesting in the case of whistleblowers who leak tax related information because the limit of what is legal and what is not is far from clear when we front multinational companies that are based on complex tax avoidance systems. Therefore, are whistleblowers who reveal tax information going to be protect by the Trade Secrets directive, or are they going to be threatened by it ? That’s the problematic we will try to resolve in this research thesis.