The European Public Prosecutor’s Office sped up the progress of the investigation into fraudulent activity present in ‘Operation Admiral’, which began in Portugal and resulted in 14 arrests in the country, European prosecutor Jose Guerra confirmed.
The magistrate – who represents the country in the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) – told Lusa that “tens of millions of euros of fraud in Portugal” are at stake and that it was on Portuguese territory that the case began.
“The case was pending with the Portuguese authorities. The investigation began with the Tax Authority (AT) and the Coimbra Public Prosecutor’s Office (MP). Later, we found an older case pending in the Porto Public Prosecutor. The cases were joined and, initially, there were two teams from Portugal’s criminal investigation police agency, PJ, and the tax authority working on the case,” he recalled, explaining that the investigation was communicated to the EPPO in mid-2021.
According to Guerra, it was fundamental “not to look at criminal activity from a national point of view” for the process to develop, leading to today’s operation, which was carried out in-country by the PJ, with about 100 home and non-domestic searches up and down the country and 14 arrests in the north, centre and Almada area for allegedly committing crimes of criminal association, tax fraud and money laundering.
“The investigation got a boost when it reached the European public prosecutor’s office. As no prejudice was defined for Portugal, the authorities themselves discussed whether there should be an investigation in Portugal,” he said, continuing: “If it wasn’t for the European perspective, the process would go nowhere.”
The EPPO’s information points to an overall VAT fraud of €2.2 billion and an operation triggered in 14 member states (Belgium, Cyprus, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia and Spain). As part of this investigation, searches were also carried out in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Slovakia, and Sweden last October.
For Portugal’s European Public Prosecutor, the “success” of this operation was due to the different way in which the authorities looked at the investigation, with the adoption of a transnational vision.
The criminal activities stretched across the 22 EPPO member states, as well as Hungary, Ireland, Sweden and Poland, and third countries, including Albania, China, Mauritius, Serbia, Singapore, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the UK, and the US.
The statement also released by the EPPO said that the investigation lasted around a year and a half and exposed “the biggest VAT carousel fraud” in the European Union, allowing links to be established “between the suspect company in Portugal and around 9,000 other legal entities, and more than 600 individuals located in different countries.”
The criminal activity involved the successive formation of a complex chain of companies, mostly selling computer equipment on online platforms, which operated by performing the necessary acts to “enrich themselves” with the amounts of VAT received from the sale of these products to end customers, in a typical ‘Missing Trader Intra-Community (MTIC) Fraud’ scheme, which damages the coffers of the EU, the PJ explained.
(João Godinho | Lusa.pt)
Source: euractiv.com
