The Directorate for Investigating Organised Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT) prosecutors have put 33 people on trial for tax evasion and complicity in tax evasion and money laundering, after allegedly causing nearly 80 million RON (rd 16,52 million EUR) in damage to the state through vegetable and fruit distribution companies.
"It was noted that, between 2009 and 2012, the legal representatives of two commercial companies, the most important in the distribution of food products (vegetables - fruits), purchased goods from the intra-Community space, using fictitious transaction circuits," reads a press release from the DIICOT sent on Wednesday, to AGERPRES.
Thus, the employees of the companies negotiated the price, ordered the goods and provided transport from the European Union to the warehouses of the company, using for these operations the commercial companies made available by six accomplices, in order to circumvent the payment of VAT due to the state budget, by fictitiously registering in the accounts of the companies some internal purchases.
The companies used did not have a real economic purpose, i.e. they did not aim to obtain a profit (the essence of the commercial activity) but they used to draw up supporting documents, recorded in the accounts of the beneficiaries, so as to give the impression that they were conducting making some internal purchases.
If the companies had registered intra-Community purchases in the accounts, they would have had to pay VAT collected as a result of the sale of the goods in Romania, but by interposing the fictitious transaction circuits they artificially created deductible VAT, which led to the reduction of the VAT payment to the state budget.
The total damage caused to the consolidated state budget is worth 79,592,632 RON.