The head of the European Public Prosecutor's Office, the Romanian Laura Kovesi. DUMITRU DORU (EFE)
The European Public Prosecutor's Office begins to pick up cruising speed.
Last year it opened 865 cases, almost double the 515 that it had active at the end of 2021, amounting to 9,900 million euros in fraud.
In total, last December the investigations that this young European institution kept open amounted to 1,117, which involved an estimated fraud of just over 14,000 million, according to the annual report of the Prosecutor's Office, directed by the Romanian Laura Kövesi.
2022 was the first full year of activity of the Community Prosecutor's Office, based in a modern glass building in Luxembourg close to the community courts.
It started up in June 2021 and its mission is to prosecute fraud that affects the community budget, hence a good part of its task is focused on prosecuting infractions that are committed with VAT.
Of those 14,000 million in estimated fraud, 47% is concentrated in the value added tax, about 6,700 million.
Three people and three legal entities were indicted by the Public Prosecutor's Office in the Czech Republic in June 2022. They were accused of receiving grants for research with nanobots, “without the intention of executing the subsidized projects”.
For this purpose, they presented false invoices and documents plus fictitious contracts for 17 projects.
In total, the Czech Treasury and the community lost about 5.5 million with this crime.
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The so-called carousel fraud also exists in Germany.
Last year, the Bavarian court sentenced three people after an investigation by the European Public Prosecutor's Office into a plot involving platinum coins.
Criminal activity extended to the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania, but was mainly concentrated in Germany.
The convicts tried to avoid paying VAT by repeatedly circulating the coins between the same companies.
The damage to public coffers amounted to 33.7 million.
These are two types of fraud that the young community institution investigates in the document presented this Tuesday and that it describes in the report presented this Tuesday through these examples.
There are three other -in Croatia, Latvia and Lithuania- examples.
Latvian, for example, consists of mounting deception in public tenders to favor one offer over another.
The Lithuanian is a classic: tobacco smuggling.
The Croatian example is also quite traditional: corruption and abuse of power in projects co-financed by the EU that amounted to 22 million.
The type of fraud and the amounts vary considerably in each of the Member States in which the Prosecutor's Office operates (it does not do so in Hungary and Poland because they did not sign the treaty that put it into operation).
In Austria or Germany, the investigations focus above all on VAT.
In the second country, for example, there are open cases for an estimated amount of about 1.8 billion, of which 1.5 billion would have to do with this tax.
In Lithuania or Latvia, States in which, due to their size, there are no large files underway, there is not a single one that is related to VAT.
The country that has unclosed cases with the highest volume of investigated funds is Italy, 3.2 billion.
Spain, on the other hand, barely has 42 open cases with an estimated volume of close to 170 million.
The Spanish Prosecutor's Office and the European one maintain serious discrepancies that have ended with the latter accusing the former -also the Government- of lack of collaboration for not giving it resources (judicial police) or access to the databases it uses in Spain Anticorruption.
There have also been clashes over specific cases, such as the investigation of the Ayuso case.
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