With raids in Germany, Italy and Bulgaria, the police took action against a gang accused of sales tax fraud running into the millions.
Three of the eleven arrested had connections to the ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia, announced the European public prosecutor's office EPPO on Wednesday.
The accused are accused of having built a criminal network through which they sold luxury cars several times between different EU countries and then had allegedly paid sales tax reimbursed by the state.
According to EPPO, the resulting damage is at least 13 million euros.
According to the investigators, the criminal "sales tax carousel" was organized by car dealers in Milan and Eichstätt in Upper Bavaria. On Wednesday morning, 17 buildings in Bavaria, 28 in Italy and one in Bulgaria were searched. Several "very high quality" cars were confiscated. During the investigation, the Italian police also came across drug deals, in connection with which four other suspects have now been arrested and hashish and marijuana have been seized.
The preliminary investigation is the first ever to be taken over by the European Public Prosecutor's Office. This European Public Prosecutor started its work in June this year. It specializes in VAT fraud to the detriment of member states of the European Union and takes on cases with a fraud amount of more than ten million euros.
Chief Public Prosecutor Marcus Paintinger, who is conducting the investigation from the EPPO office in Munich, says: "Without the EPPO, the preparations for this operation would have taken months - now it was a matter of weeks".
Time-consuming requests for legal assistance to other public prosecutors abroad are no longer necessary, since the EPPO works like a single authority with offices in 22 EU countries.
Thanks to the common working language English, a lot of translation work is also no longer necessary.