Officials of the Customs and Monopolies Agency have Discovered a criminal association aimed at evasion VAT and smuggling through the use of forgeries import customs declarations operating through the Screen of Bulgarian "paper mills" companies evading several million euros of VAT and duties by presenting at customs Artificial documentation in order to allow the customs clearance of the goods.

According to the reconstructions carried out, the foreign goods that arrived at the port of Genoa Prà did not absolve value added tax and was addressed to two companies Bulgarian turned out to be mere "empty boxes". The Investigations have shown that the goods were instead placed in consumption in Italy and in other countries of the Union, other than that originally declared, thus completely evading VAT. To this end, falsified transport documents delivered from time to time to Conveyors.

A second type of illegal activity, false for induction into public act, aggravated smuggling and evasion of import VAT consisted in the systematic alteration of the commercial documentation referring to the imported goods with customs declaration of taxable values lower than those in order to reduce the amount of duties and VAT payable on import.

A third further and different strand of false by induction and smuggling concerned a series of resulting shipments of goods to the foreign state, therefore in suspension of tax, which went allocated within a special temporary storage warehouse managed by a logistics company, when in reality The goods did not pass through the warehouse.

Customs officials, together with the personnel of the Police of State coordinated by the Public Prosecutor's Office of Genoa, have carried out a series of precautionary, personal and real measures in prison against the two leaders and promoters of the criminal association and proceeded to the preventive seizure of a company operating in the customs procedures. The company managed by the The same subjects were systematically used for commission. of a large number of criminal episodes.

Eight other suspects are instead recipients of the measure of house arrest: these are five employees of the company, as well as the owner and the two employees of the logistics company which is also the recipient of a preventive seizure.

These measures follow more than 12 months of stalking, monitoring activities through cameras and GPS and interception of five telephone users carried out, under the coordination of the Genoese Public Prosecutor's Office, by ADM officials of the Anti-Fraud Office of the Interregional Directorate for Liguria, Piedmont and Valle d'Aosta in collaboration with the staff of the Traffic Police Section. Evidentiary material collected, also as a result of search activities at the locations of two companies attributable to the participants to the criminal association, led to the registration in the register of the suspects of the twelve people, all of nationality and made it possible to prove that this association operated through the three distinct fraudulent guidelines.

The entire investigation was born from a previous activity Investigation conducted by customs officials who had allowed to bring to light the existence of a criminal association - also rooted in the Ligurian capital, established for the purpose of fraudulent acquisition of bank loans with guarantee of the State, which had led to the preventive seizure of current accounts and other financial reports for over €2.3 million.