There are almost 200,000 people working for PricewaterhouseCoopers around the world – about 16,000 of them in the UK. The fast-growing professional services firm is always on the lookout for bright young job applicants and its stall is a regular fixture at many universities on the “milk round” recruitment circuit.

By most accounts, it is a splendid place to work. The firm has held the top spot in The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers rankings – voted for by graduates – for the past 11 years.

If you are an ambitious student, you may be interested to learn about the summer internships (paid) on offer this year in the PwC tax advisory department. “We help our clients create the value they want,” the recruitment literature says. “We help measure, protect and enhance the things that matter most to them … You’ll get a real taste of life at the heart of PwC, working … on live and interesting client projects.”

In 2008, a bright, 22-year-old French graduate called Antoine Deltour went to work for PwC in Luxembourg, full of hope about working for one of the best employers in the world. But it was not the company he thought it was. In fact, he quit within two years. “I discovered how extreme the system was in reality – it was a massive tax optimisation practice,” he has since reflected. “I didn’t want to be part of that.”

Before leaving, however, criminal prosecutors in Luxembourg now believe he copied sensitive internal papers – confidential tax rulings that PwC had secured from the Luxembourg tax office for some of the most well-known multinationals.

Last November, the Guardian and other news outlets published detailed investigations based on leaked, PwC-drafted Luxembourg tax rulings.

The result was international outrage, summed up most recently by Margaret Hodge, chair of the UK parliament’s public accounts committee, who last week said the investigations had demonstrated PwC was promoting tax avoidance “on an industrial scale”. PwC’s protestations to the contrary misled parliament, her cross-party committee concluded.

Despite being more than five years old, many of the leaked PwC-brokered tax deals are still “live”, continuing to form the central pillar in complex tax avoidance structures for big multinationals. The leaked papers provided a glimpse of the true nature of the modern social contract between global business and nation states. This has – temporarily at least – galvanised political leaders across European and beyond. Promising tax-reform plans are now emerging, through the OECD, which would block the kind of toxic Luxembourg structures that have become routine in the tax planning playbook.

Thanks to a police complaint brought by PwC, Deltour is facing criminal charges including theft and violation of Luxembourg professional secrecy laws. A second former PwC staffer is facing similar charges.

In the face of the scandal, the message from PwC has been resolute: it has done nothing wrong; it has advised clients faithfully, and always within the bounds of its own ethical code: “Doing the right thing – the PwC way”.

Hodge believes the culture in professional services is now so corrosive – and oriented toward bending law to favour clients in ways that run counter to the intention of parliaments – that legislation is required to fine firms and those involved in bad practice and exclude them from public sector work.

Whatever the practical objections to such suggestions might be, it is clear Hodge is voicing a growing dissatisfaction with PwC and its peers. Accountants were once ribbed for being a bit boring. That image is changing – not for the better.

“Take the opportunity of a lifetime,” PwC has been telling undergraduates across the country. “Your career is just that: yours. You choose it. You live it. You make it happen.” The firm has 1,570 graduate vacancies this year, making it the second largest milk round recruiter after Teach First, the public sector fast-track teaching programme.

It is not hard to see the attraction. The number of top-paying corporate recruiters has shrunk, while student debts have soared. Tough choices have to be made. But perhaps prospective recruits might do well to ask themselves one question at the outset: would you really be at ease “doing the right thing – the PwC way”?

Britain isn’t buying everything in TTIP

Not all the talk in Brussels this past week has been about Greece. The other hot issue is the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP for short. Not since the Tory party split over the repeal of the Corn Laws in the 1840s has trade been such a sexy issue. There was an unprecedented response when the European commission held a public consultation, virtually all of it negative. Labour MEPs say it comes up often when they are canvassing – almost certainly a first for a trade deal.

The reason TTIP is contentious has nothing to do with what it would mean for tariffs, which are already low on goods traded by the EU and the US. Nor does it really have that much to do with the real meat of the negotiations, which is an attempt to harmonise regulations on both side of the Atlantic and therefore remove barriers to trade. There are some concerns that this might mean harmonising downwards rather than up, but this would not normally be enough to stir passions.

No, the real problem for TTIP is the investor state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism and, at this stage, it looks like a deal-breaker. The rationale is that investors needs protection from their property being seized by a foreign government, and that redress should come from an independent panel.

But, in truth, an ISDS is not necessary when both parties in a deal already have robust legal systems to deal with grievances. There is a strong suspicion that US companies, with their notoriously litigious approach, will use ISDS as a means of putting the frighteners on elected governments. The big concern in the UK is that ISDS would put the NHS at risk, with privatisation of services becoming much harder to reverse.

So while TTIP might boost growth and jobs, ISDS has made the deal politically toxic on this side of the Atlantic. If ISDS is taken off the table, the US will demand concessions in return, diluting the agreement. The alternative, though, is no deal at all.

Should the BT-EE deal set bells ringing at the regulator?

The City loves the £12.5bn deal announced by BT last week to buy EE, operator for the Orange and T-Mobile brands.

BT’s shares are on the up and newish boss Gavin Patterson is being lauded for the move into “quad play”. Patterson, who was promoted when Ian Livingston took government office, can now offer customers their four big telecoms needs: TV, broadband, landline phone and mobile.

So if investors are happy, what about the all-important customer? Patterson rattled off the answers last week. “Some of the savings we are able to make by simplifying the network will be passed on to the consumer,” he said. It is not entirely convincing. Richard Lloyd, the boss of consumer body Which?, makes the point that bundling services makes it more difficult to compare products, and reducing the number of providers is rarely good for their customers.

The regulators, Ofcom and the Competition and Markets Authority, will need to spell out how they will make sure users are not the losers in all the City’s euphoria.