Tax fraud and cross-border money laundering: The soldiers of the provincial command of the Guardia di Finanza in Piacenza have enforced a custody order
Preliminary Order in prison issued by the Preliminary Investigation Judge at the Court of
Padua, against a 45-year-old Italian man identified as the leader of a criminal organization dedicated to committing cross-border VAT fraud.
The investigations carried out by the Economic and Financial Police of Piacenza have revealed the following:
allowed to collect serious evidence of the existence of a criminal organization
aimed at committing fraud in the field of intra-community VAT (“carousel”), as well as
the subsequent money laundering and reuse of illegally obtained proceeds. In particular, the carousel fraud was structured as follows: the people involved bought IT and electronic products abroad and involved a number of fictitious companies based in both Italy and the European Union in commercial transactions in order to take advantage of the non-application of VAT, since it was are intra-community transactions where the tax is levied in the country of destination.
The fraudulent mechanism involving more than 20 people and 70 “paper” companies (34 of them are Italian and the rest in Austria, Belgium,
Bulgaria, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia,
Slovenia and Spain) made it possible to generate multimillion-dollar VAT credits and, after various fictitious sales, to resell technology and IT products – including high-end products – at a much lower price than the prices charged by competing companies. possibly discounts of more than 50%.
The GIP of the Court of Padua therefore ordered the preventive confiscation of the equivalent of the profit obtained from the crime, up to the amount of the evaded VAT, which was over 28 million euros. The action led, among other things, to the seizure of the shares of a company, as well as a real estate complex in a historic building at the center of the arrested person, who is believed to be at the head of the criminal group in Bologna.
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