Padua agri-food market, false procurement contracts for 18 million euros and fraudulent labour: preventive seizures for 1.4 million. The Fiamme Gialle of Treviso have discovered a tax fraud of 26.5 million euros in the Maap: 30 entrepreneurs reported and two companies for administrative liability.
Procurement fraud, 29 companies involved
There are 29 companies involved in the fraud, among them 2 companies from Trevisoactive in the logistics sector (employing around 150 workers and an overall average annual turnover of 6 million euros) and 27 client companieslocated between the provinces of Padua, Rovigo, Treviso and Venice, of which 23 active in the Padua market. The revenues achieved were distributed through theissuing invoices for non-existent operations between the two contractors, for 8.5 million euros totals from which an undue deduction of VAT arose. For 1.4 million euros. In relation to this last amount, the Judge for Preliminary Investigations at the Court of Treviso ordered the preventive seizure of properties, financial resources, cars and company shares. The investigations, conducted by the Treviso Group, were started following two separate tax audits towards the contracting companies, linked by a Temporary Business Association contract, which, in the fraudulent mechanism brought to light, had the task of supplying the workers. One of the two, in particular, had been established for the sole purpose of hiring, with fixed-term contractsthe employees have reached the maximum limit of contractual renewals legally foreseen, thus bypassing the 5 legislation protecting workers.
Tender fraud, that’s how it worked
The service contract, stipulated with companies that only formally hire the workers and fulfill the related tax and social security obligations: in reality, the relationships between clients and contracting companies are structured for the sole purpose of “interposing” between the workers and the companies for which they actually provide their work. In other words, the use of external personnel to the client companies has allowed them to use manpower “at will”, without the constraints and fixed costs of a permanent contract. By reconstructing the “manpower supply chain”, thanks to the examination of computer documentation and by listening to the various workers, it was reconstructed how the working relationships with the various clients were devoid of the elements that characterize the legality of the contract, namely the business risk and the autonomous organization of means and resources. From a series of spreadsheets and messages of e-mail between the contracting company and the clients, theabsence of risk, given that the compensation for the contracts was commensurate exclusively with the hourly cost of the workers supplied by the Treviso companies (with the addition of a modest profit margin), without any link to result objectives. Furthermore, a real one was deduced lack of organization of resources by the contracting companiesboth with regard to the instrumental goods necessary for the execution of the services covered by the contracts, which rental and maintenance costs they were promptly recharged to the contracting companies, both with reference to the exercise of management power over the workers employed, in fact externally directed, i.e. subject to management and control by the clients, with only tasks of an administrative nature remaining to the supplying companies. In particular, workers, during the course of their performance, they carried out the orders given by the end customers themselves of the companies subjected to verification, who decided the number of employees needed daily, the tasks to be carried out, the times and the executive methods; emblematic is the circumstance that, in some cases, the clients interviewed the workers that the contracting companies had to hire, also imposing specific contractual clauses on them and providing ad personam production bonuses. Hence, the legal non-existence of the invoices issued by the Treviso companies both among themselves (for 8.5 million euros) and towards the clients (for 18 million euros), for a total of 26.5 million euros.
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