Pistoia, 20 June 2024 – Over 133 million liters of fuel obtained illicitly in the space of a few years and profits for over 15 million euros. All thanks to a complex mechanism of paper companies, which – according to what emerged – operated a criminal organization headed by a forty-year-old entrepreneur of Apulian origins. Pandora’s box was opened by a major operation that was conducted by the Financial Police of Ancona by delegation of the Trani Prosecutor’s Office, and the investigations also arrived in the Pistoia area, as well as in Marche, Abruzzo, Puglia, Emilia Romagna and Sardinia.
As part of the investigation they were seized also 32 real estate units, including two petrol stations in the province of Teramo, a fuel depot in the province of Reggio Emilia, a resort in the municipality of Arzachena, Baia Sardinia, a residence in the province of Teramo, as well as various luxury apartments and land also in the province of Pistoia . Yesterday morning, a few dozen soldiers from the yellow flames of the economic-financial police unit of Ancona, with the collaboration of the departments of the body in the various territories, placed the seals on the assets. The Apulian entrepreneur – we learn – is accused of having put in place, with the creation of fictitious corporate structures, completely tax-defaulting, a tax fraud in the trade of petroleum products reinvesting the proceeds in real estate assets. According to what emerges from the investigations, the organization used shell companies for non-EU purchases in various refineries, particularly in Slovenia, procuring large quantities of fuel not subject to VAT on the purchase.
The fuel , from what has been reconstructed, was then sold without VAT and income tax returns to three “paper companies” formally based in Bulgaria and the Czech Republic and which were managed by members of the organisation. In essence they were resold at rock-bottom prices and with an invoice, to distributors often attributable to, or coinciding with, the same ones behind the fictitious paper mills.
