The prosecutor’s office of Komarka Braga charged 83 defendants, chief among them a lawyer, with a “criminal scheme” of tax evasion that would have caused more than 28 million euros in damage to the state, it was announced on Monday. .
The note, published on the Porto Regional Attorney General’s website, states that 26 of the defendants are commercial companies.
According to the Public Ministry (MP), the defendant lawyer was “the mentor of the whole scheme”.
Together with eight other defendants, including accountants, he will implement between the beginning of 2011 and the end of 2016 “a fraudulent scheme consisting in the systematic and repeated inclusion in the accounts of commercial companies of invoices issued by other companies that do not correspond to any or actual transactions by spoofing your content.”
Also, according to the deputy, commercial companies that used invoices “thus included in their accounting expenses that they did not actually incur, received VAT deductions to which they were not entitled, and reduced the IRC payable for artificial profit increase”. .
For their part, the billing companies were led by “flank managers deliberately hired for this purpose, who were paid monthly sums ranging from 500 to 750 euros”.
As a result of this behavior, the state will suffer damages of more than 28.1 million euros, while requests were made for the loss of benefits, namely support in the liquidation of non-compliant assets.
Criminal association, tax fraud, money laundering and qualified tax fraud are the crimes charged to the defendants.