Edited by Sergio Silvestri

They had engineered a scheme to resell imported fuel at unfair prices, evading VAT by over €45 million. The Pescara Provincial Finance Police, through Operation "Black Gold," uncovered this massive scam: 172 reports were filed for tax offenses including issuing and using invoices for non-existent transactions, money laundering, self-laundering, and fraudulent bankruptcy. The Public Prosecutor's Offices of Lanciano and Velletri also ordered a precautionary seizure of nearly €8 million.

The scheme, the Guardia di Finanza writes in a statement, is a pyramid scheme: at the top, national and EU oil suppliers, from whom "shell" companies, represented by specially recruited, penniless front men who had never operated in the sector, purchased diesel fuel without VAT, then resold it to independent distributors, the "white pumps," at rock-bottom prices—less than half the cost of diesel, again without VAT. The fuel then ended up in consumers' cars at high market prices. The Provincial Commander of the Guardia di Finanza in Pescara, Antonio Caputo, emphasizes that "the deception is twofold: it seriously damages the national and European Union budgets due to significant VAT evasion, and it causes significant market disruption through unfair competition from local and independent distributors who knowingly source from criminal organizations at prices lower than the average prices charged at gas pumps." What was implemented – he continues – was “a perverse mechanism, which is totally detrimental both to honest operators who, failing to be competitive, lose large market shares, and to citizens, whose savings are being eroded every day by skyrocketing prices due to energy costs and fraud that disrupt the regular functioning of an extremely strategic sector.”

Source. https://www.gdf.gov.it/it