The Civil Guard and the Customs Surveillance Service have immobilized 20.231 bottles of alcoholic beverages for fraud against the regulations on Excise Taxes in the provinces of Alicante, Castellón and Valencia.
In the month of September, the Alicante Civil Guard Command received information from the Barcelona Civil Guard (Fiscal Service), referring to the carrying out of various inspections in shops selling alcoholic beverages to the public in the aforementioned Catalan province. and that would have resulted in the detection of violations of the regulations on excise duties.
The information received revealed the involvement in this fraud of an alcoholic beverage distillery located in the Marina Alta region, for which reason the Tax Agency was notified, as the competent body in the field of Excise Taxes, continuing the investigations of jointly between the Customs Surveillance Service of the Tax Agency and the Civil Guard of Alicante.
In the first phase, and after collecting the precise information on the facts investigated, the procedure was carried out on September 26 by components of the Fiscal Patrol of the Calp Company, the Customs Surveillance Service in Alicante and the Judicial Police. of the Civil Guard of Xàbia to the inspection of 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.
In this action, various irregularities were discovered, such as bottles of alcoholic beverages without the required fiscal marks, drinks with fraudulent labeling in terms of batch, graduation or capacity, as well as the discovery of a significant number of empty bottle hulls bearing seals, in perfect condition. conditions to be reused. Additionally, a hidden room was discovered, adjacent to the ship. The sum of evidence revealed a deliberate and recurring 'modus operandi', and such a scale of fraud that it led to a second operational phase in the investigation.
On November 11, 2022, this second phase was carried out, which had the objective of inspecting 14 establishments throughout the Valencian Community: Benidorm (5), Calp (2), Benissa (1), Finestrat (1 ), Ondara (1), Navarrés (1), Ribarroja (1), Onda (1) and Torreblanca (1). Units of the Fiscal Service of the Civil Guard, the Customs Surveillance Service of the Tax Agency, as well as the Judicial Police of the Civil Guard participated in all of them.
In practically all of these inspections, irregularities in the field of excise duties similar to those already highlighted in the first phase were discovered, all of them closely related to a fraudulent use of the seals that must be attached to the bottles of alcoholic content, assuming the avoidance of the payment of the excise tax, or sometimes a payment less than due in attention to the alcoholic graduation of each specific product.
This action is of great importance both for tax fraud discovered in the field of Excise Duties on alcoholic beverages, as well as for consumer protection and in the fight against fraud and unfair competition, to the detriment of legal trade of this type. of products, avoiding the advantageous situation that incurring in the fraud discovered implies for the infringing company, by seeing its operating cost decrease, unlike that of its direct competition, which would be significantly higher. In addition, damage is caused to the Public Treasury due to the decrease in taxation that should be collected in accordance with current excise tax regulations.
