Macronleaks: more than financial crimes

06.05.2017

Did presidential candidate Macron evade taxes? WikiLeaks reported a "great" leak of emails from the headquarters of French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron (#MacronLeaks), which contains hundreds of thousands of emails, photos and applications, dated to the period before April 24, 2017 -- about, gigabytes in total, "- wrote the organization in its Twitter microblog.

In the network, there were pictures of documents about the involvement of Emmanuel Macron in a working agreement with a limited liability company (LLC) located on the Caribbean island of Nevis, which apparently had business relations with a bank previously found to evade paying taxes in the Cayman Islands. Anonymously published PDF files show corporate reports of the company called La Providence LLC, presumably created by Mr. Macron in Nevis, a kind of offshore tax paradise for unethical citizens. Publications in the Internet contain images of an agreement fax between «La Providence Ltd.» and «First Caribbean International Bank»,and its first and last pages in particular with the signatures of participants in the named working arrangement.

The leaks in the network show that Macron's assets were not located in the Bahamas, as previously reported in the media, but in the Cayman Islands - another widely known hot spot for tax evasion. The materials also testify that the signatories of the agreement took special measures to conceal the personalities of the treaty participants to avoid possible arrest in connection with the violation of the laws of the European Union.

The source of the publications, that has compromised the candidate for the presidency of France Macron, also announced that a group of people who has been working in the Internet with a source in the Cayman Islands for several months, will soon receive information about the location of the alleged accounts of Mr. Macron and  the "degree of concealment of this money from the government [of France] ". 

Today Makron strongly denies the authenticity of the leaks, declaring to the «France Inter Radio' the following: "I have never had accounts in any tax havens, wherever, first, because it is not in my nature, and secondly, because, I always cared about the public domain of my country." The Macron's team also continues to assert that these news are spreading with the help of the Russian hacker network, without providing any evidence of these allegations. 

Official reaction

The French prosecutor's office characterized the leak as "a possible attempt to blacken the presidential candidate Emanuel Macron" and opened the case about the source of the leak after Mr. Macron filed an appropriate complaint.  

Analyzing the problem who could benefit from such a leak, Wikileaks noted that since this event happened too late to affect the upcoming presidential elections in France, it can be used to increase the degree of hostility towards Russia, and to enlarge the cost of maintenance ofWestern intelligence services.