The Fiamme Gialle of the Provincial Command of Treviso, as part of the fight against forms of illegality that undermine the correct functioning of the legal economy, they discovered and stopped a criminal group, rooted in the Treviso area since 2018dedicated to the commission of serial scams against leasing companies, reporting 30 people and ascertaining the involvement of 22 companies with operational offices in the provinces of Bergamo, Brescia, Caserta, Chieti, Ferrara, Milan, Naples, Padua, Rovigo, Rome, Salerno, Treviso and Venice.The investigative activities, coordinated by the local Public Prosecutor’s Office, made it possible to outline the fraudulent mechanism according to which the suspects acted:
– initially leasing companies were offered the purchase of an industrial asset, which later turned out to be non-existent, for subsequent leasing to a third party, found and proposed by the same supplier of the asset;
– subsequently, a rental contract for the movable property was stipulated between the leasing company and the leasing company indicated by the original supplier;
– therefore the same supplier sent the technical documentation to the leasing companies and that relating to the transport of the industrial good to the tenant, its commissioning and testing;
– finally, the leasing contract was not honoured, or only the first installments were paid by the tenants, who subsequently lost track of themselves.
The crimes being prosecuted are criminal association, accused of five of the thirty suspects, held responsible for having set up a criminal group with the specific aim of damaging five leasing companies, active in the provinces of Milan, Venice, Siena and Bologna. All the people subjected to investigations are also accused of fraud, aggravated by the abuse of work, for having prepared, with artifices and deceptions – and in particular through false tests and altered photographic repertoires – suitable documents to believe that the machinery offered for sale to leasing companies, simulating the transfer to the final drivers through the use of false transport documents.
In detail, there were 18 incidents of fraud and mainly concerned the fictitious sale of power generators, sold for amounts between 40 thousand and 80 thousand euros, for a total damage to the leasing companies amounting to approximately one million euros.; other goods targeted by the scam were forklifts, cutters and bagging machines. The 10 de jure and de facto directors of the 4 Treviso companies, who had the role of proposing the sale of the non-existent machinery, were also accused of violating the tax regulations, including the failure to declare, the issuing and use of invoices for objectively non-existent operations amounting to 3.5 million euros, for evaded VAT amounting to 1.5 million euros.
The service activity of the Treviso Financial Police, carried out in close collaboration with the damaged leasing companies, had the aim of bringing to light and blocking the activity of a criminal group established in the Treviso area, thus counteracting an insidious mechanism fraudulent capable of undermining the normality of economic exchanges.
