The Guardia di Finanza of Piacenza has arrested a 45-year-old man – under a precautionary detention order in prison issued by the Padua examining magistrate – and found him to be 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 – explain Piacenza’s yellow flames – have made it possible to gather serious evidence of the existence of a criminal organization whose aim is also to commit “merry-go-round” fraud on intra-community VAT commit and subsequent money laundering and reuse of the illegal proceeds generated.
In particular, the Ministry of Finance reports the details of the carousel fraud: the people involved bought IT and electronics products abroad and involved a number of fictitious companies based in both Italy and the European Union in the trades in order to take advantage of the unauthorized companies. Application of VAT, as these are intra-community transactions where the tax is levied in the country of destination.
The fraudulent mechanism involving more than 20 compliant individuals and 70 “paper” companies (34 of them Italian and the rest in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland and the Czech Republic). Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain) would have made it possible to generate multi-million VAT credits and, after several fictitious sales, to resell technology and IT products – even high-end products – at a price significantly lower than that asked on the market by honest companies , which grant discounts of more than 50% under certain circumstances.
The investigating magistrate of the Court of Padua therefore , at the request of the European Public Prosecutor delegated to the Venice office , ordered the preventive confiscation of the equivalent value of the profits from the crime up to the amount of the evaded VAT of more than 28 million euros .
The action led, among other things, to the seizure of the shares of a company, as well as a prestigious real estate complex located in a historic building in the city, against the arrested person, who is believed to be at the head of the criminal group in the center of Bologna.