Joint operation

• The investigation, which began in the province of Barcelona in August, has been carried out in the provinces of Alicante, Castellón and Valencia.
• In a warehouse in the Marina Alta region alone, the amount defrauded from the Treasury would amount to 30,000 euros and the material immobilized in a warehouse in Ribarroja would have a retail price of 138,765 euros.

December 1, 2022.- The Customs Surveillance Service of the Tax Agency and the Civil Guard of Alicante have seized 20,231 bottles of alcoholic beverages for fraud against the Excise Tax regulations in the provinces of Alicante, Castellón and Valencia.

In September, the Alicante Civil Guard Headquarters received information from the Barcelona Civil Guard (Tax Service) regarding the carrying out of various inspections in shops selling alcoholic beverages to the public in the aforementioned Catalan province, which had resulted in the detection of violations of the regulations on excise duties.

The information received indicated that an alcoholic beverage distillery located in the Marina Alta region was involved in this fraud, so the Tax Agency, as the competent body in matters of Excise Taxes, was notified, and joint investigations were continued by the Tax Agency's Customs Surveillance Service and the Civil Guard of Alicante.

In a first phase, and after gathering the necessary information on the facts under investigation, on 26 September members of the Fiscal Patrol of the Calpe Company, the Customs Surveillance Service in Alicante and the Judicial Police of the Civil Guard of Jávea proceeded to inspect a factory and a warehouse in the Marina Alta region, as well as a store selling alcoholic beverages to the public in the municipality of Ondara, all of them belonging to the same business group.

During this operation, various irregularities were discovered, such as bottles of alcoholic beverages without the required tax marks, drinks with fraudulent labelling regarding batch, alcohol content or capacity, as well as the discovery of a significant number of empty bottle caps with seals, in perfect condition to be reused. Additionally, a hidden room was discovered, adjacent to the ship. The sum of the evidence revealed a deliberate and recurrent modus operandi and a scale of fraud that led to a second operational phase in the investigation.

On November 11, 2022, this second phase was carried out, which aimed to inspect 14 establishments throughout the Valencian Community: Benidorm (5), Calpe (2), Benissa (1), Finestrat (1), Ondara (1), Navarrés (1), Ribarroja (1), Onda (1) and Torreblanca (1).  Units from the Fiscal Service of the Civil Guard, the Customs Surveillance Service of the Tax Agency, and the Judicial Police of the Civil Guard participated in all of them.

In almost all of these inspections, irregularities were discovered in the area of excise taxes similar to those already highlighted in the first phase, all of them closely related to fraudulent use of the seals that must be attached to bottles of alcoholic content, leading to the evasion of payment of the excise tax, or sometimes a payment lower than that due in view of the alcohol content of each specific product.

This action is of great importance both because of the tax fraud discovered in the field of Special Taxes on alcoholic beverages, and for the protection of consumers and in the fight against fraud and unfair competition, to the detriment of the legal trade of this type of products, avoiding the advantageous situation that supposes for the offending company to incur in the discovered fraud, by seeing its operating costs reduced, unlike those of its direct competition, which would be significantly higher, as well as the damage caused to the Public Treasury by the decrease in taxation that should be collected in accordance with the current regulations on special taxes.