Europe’s €2.9 billion tax fraud, explained

Welcome, Salsabeel.

Thank you for joining me today.

Thank you for having me.

Well, Salsabeel, your story starts almost like a crime film.

It's in the early morning, the 29th of November 2022 in Fafé, a small town in the north of Portugal.

Can you take us there? What happened on that day?

Yeah, so on that day, police raided a house, a two-storeyed house belonging to a person called La Vivante.

who lived there with his family.

So the police raided his house, what they believed to be one of the suspects, one person involved in a VAT fraud case.

And eventually they found something much more interesting, basically the holy grail of the whole investigation, something that would lead later on to discovering the whole scheme behind it.

And when this raid happened, Lavivong and his family, were they home at the time?

No, so Lavivong was not at home.

They found him about two hours later.

He was about eight kilometers from his residence.

And this raid was part of something much bigger.

It was called Operation Admiral.

What was that

operation? So the operation, it first started in Portugal.

So the case Admiral won.

So that was the first straw, let's say, of the investigation.

It started by the tax investigators in Portugal who saw something within a company that was suspicious.

And it then quickly evolved into several other sub cases, let's say.

So you have Admiral 2 case, you have 3 in Greece, but actually there are much more cases, between 20 and 30 cases in total.

2.9 billion euros of losses of actually missed VAT money from EU member states.

So we're going to walk through all the steps, how something fishy at first leads to a 2.9 billion euro fraud.