Trips certainly not within everyone’s reach, by air taxi, aboard 7/10 seater Cessna twin-engine planes to destinations such as Dubai, Istanbul, Nice, Amsterdam, Zurich, Tallinn, Stockholm. To be clear, the rental of a ten-seater plane to Dubai amounted to around 80 thousand euros. Too bad tax evasion was just around the corner.
The Pisa Financial Police discovered tax evasion during an inspection of ten air taxi companies, which from 2021 to 2023 failed to pay the tax due for the transport of passengers: it is a tax whose amount varies depending on the route traveled and the number of passengers transported and which falls under environmental taxes, i.e. aimed at taxing services with a negative impact on the environment. After having acquired and examined the declarations of the carriers filed with the handling companies operating at the Galilei airport in Pisa, the financiers found that, given the almost one thousand flights carried out, the airlines had not paid the tax, generating a total debt equal to approximately half a million euros: 338,690 euros as tax due and the remainder as an additional sanction.
The airlines are tax resident in one case in Italy and in nine abroad (Austria, Germany, Lithuania, Serbia, Malta, Turkey, Bulgaria and Poland). Against a Serbian airline, in the face of numerous and repeated omissions in paying the tax on luxury flights, the proposal for a precautionary measure of an aircraft to guarantee the credit, over 120 thousand euros, was submitted to the Revenue Agency. The operation of the Guardia di Finanza of Pisa had the aim of protecting the treasury coffers on the one hand, and on the other the air carriers who regularly pay the taxes due for ‘air taxi’ flights, thus contributing to re-establishing compliance with the competition rules in this transport sector.
