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LUCRATIVE TANKERS. The diesel and petrol trade has been attracting corrupt merchants, bent on evading taxes, for years now. But according to people from the profession and also according to customs officials tax evasion has been increasing considerably as of late. Swindlers can earn hundreds of thousands of crowns on one tanker.

Miroslav Petr
www.ihned.cz/petr

After a number of years fuel merchants are once again attacking the Czech fuel market with fuels with shady origins and even shadier prices. At this time the customs administration is investigating almost one hundred suspicions of tax fraud for tens of millions of crowns. According to oilmen, however, the damage from tax evasion could reach hundreds of millions, if not a billion, crowns.
For several weeks now Czech petrol station owners have been snowed under with offers of fuel at a price that is unrealistically low when taking the proper payment of excise tax and VAT. “Not a week goes by where I do not get a suspiciously advantageous offer to purchase fuel from companies whose names I have never heard of before in my life. I am sure that more than a few of the vendors that are approached get roped in,” state the manager of one of the Czech wholesale companies, who wanted to remain anonymous.

Strange Offers Increasing
Other pump owners also confirm the avalanche of shady offers, which are often lower than the price calculated according to the Rotterdam exchange. “Our members have noted on the market lately that there is an appreciable increase in offers for prices that are unachievable while doing honest business,” the head of the Association of Czech Petrol Stations, Ivan Indráček, stated. “They are offers of products that cannot come from standard domestic sources,” Otakar Šruma from the G7 oil company added.
One such offer, for example, states: “We offer fuel from reputable companies from Čepro terminals, with a guarantee of at least one crown per litre under Čepro’s announced prices, with unlimited amounts…”
“We do not do business with any such company,” Čepro’s Sales Director Jan Duspěva stated, however. According to Duspěva the state-controlled distribution company Jeho is already cooperating with the police. “This situation is damaging our reputation and shows the impudence of some companies. We do not even have any storage facilities at the location where we allegedly offer the goods,” Duspěva stated.
Suspicious fuel has been flowing into the Czech Republic from abroad for years now, though according to people from the industry it is unusually frequent now. It is imported, for example, from storage spaces in Linz, Austria. Apparently around forty tankers cross the border to the Czech Republic from here every day. And nobody knows how many of those are transporting petrol and diesel tax-free.
The spokesman for the General Directorate of Customs, Jiří Barták, confirmed reports of continuing extensive investigations, though did not give any details. “We have an efficient system for registering the movement of goods. It gets more complicated, for example, when the importer feigns transit to another country and the fuel stays in the Czech Republic.”

Hundreds of Thousands per Tanker
In the case of a litre of petrol the excise tax is 12 crowns, which is almost half of the price at the pumps. In the event the excise duty is not paid then about 400 thousand crowns ends up in the pockets of the swindler in this manner. If the importer also evades paying VAT, then another more than three crowns per litre can be added to the total sum.
Feigned transit, illegally decreasing VAT by calculating it from the price before including the high excise tax, feigned high losses while storing the fuel. Or also the approach of companies that acknowledge the tax but end up going bankrupt intentionally before paying the tax while suddenly establishing another company. According to the Editor-in-Chief of the industry magazine Petrol, Tomáš Mikšovský, these are only a few of the tricks that swindlers practice, often through planted straw men.
“The opening of the Schengen borders brought a great increase of fraud. Disposing of suspiciously cheap fuel on the market is easy,” Mikšovský said.
One of the networks of petrol stations suspected of buying and selling suspiciously cheap fuel, for example, is Plzeň’s Tank Ono. Its owners have denied deliberate cooperation with shady partners for years. “The supplier shows me a license, I verify the data at the financial office, ask him for a permit and he must show me certification. But I do not study if that company is going bankrupt,” Jiří Ondra, the co-owner of Tank Ono, described negotiations with the supplier in Petrol magazine.
The Czech Republic has been a haven for fuel swindlers since the beginning of the nineties when taxes were evaded by substituting light fuel oil for diesel. In the past few years Setadiesel was under investigation for tax evasion amounting to hundreds of millions of crowns, suspicious imports for Germany were investigated as were the dealings of businessman Martin Uher. World Servis is also one of the companies that officials have been dealing with since last year.