Around a year and a half after the European Public Prosecutor's Office began work in 22 member states of the European Union (EU), the first main hearing at the Frankfurt Regional Court begins in a case that the Frankfurt unit of the EU investigative authority has indicted.

From next Friday on there will be two men in the dock who are said to have evaded sales tax on a large scale by actually only billing for services rendered on paper in the form of expensive telephone calls to Ghana or Azerbaijan.

One of the two is said to have acted from North Rhine-Westphalia, the other from Hesse.

Anna Sophia Lang

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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The backers are said to be based in Great Britain and have contacts in Dubai, with one of the accused in Frankfurt acting as the national coordinator for Germany and organizing front companies to write invoices.

Also accused are other acts of companies from the network, which are about the sale of Airpods, cell phones and memory cards.

14 charges and five judgments in Germany

The European Public Prosecutor's Office is an independent EU authority and investigates crimes against the EU's financial interests.

It is the first supranational prosecutor's office, which brings the advantage of faster and easier investigations into cross-border crime.

Five EU countries are not participating: Poland, Hungary, Denmark, Ireland and Sweden, with Sweden recently announcing its intention to join, European Deputy Public Prosecutor Andrès Ritter said at a meeting with Hesse's Justice Minister Roman Poseck (CDU) on Friday.

He further reported that in the first year around 1,000 investigations were initiated and there were more than 4,000 criminal charges.

Ritter assumes that EUR 50 billion in damage occurs in the EU every year simply because

because corporate networks evade VAT.

According to the current status, 14 charges have been filed in Germany in all areas, five judgments are final.

"We started in a way that promises a lot for the future," said Ritter.

The authority has already operated around 260 million euros in asset skimming.

"We bring in more money than we cost."

The Frankfurt unit in the offices of the Attorney General is one of five in Germany.

The others are based in Berlin, Munich, Cologne and Hamburg.

It currently consists of three, soon to be four, public prosecutors and is responsible for Hesse, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saarland and Baden-Württemberg.

She mainly investigates suspected sales tax carousels, in customs procedures - for example related to smuggling or anti-dumping rules - and in those involving the abuse of EU subsidies.

Roman Poseck spoke on Friday of an “effective, international unit”.

This suits Frankfurt as a city and place of justice with an international and European character.