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Spain busts gang running carbon tax fraud

Spanish police on Tuesday announced they had broken up a criminal gang running a multi-million-euro fraud that dodged import and carbon taxes on the sale of refrigerated greenhouse gases.

Published: 29 June 2022 09:17 CEST

gas tax traud guardia civil

The gang exploited the fact that European businesses have the right to transit goods imported from non-EU countries through EU territory. Photo: Guardia Civil

In a series of raids, police arrested 27 suspects and seized 110 tonnes of different kinds of gas worth €11 million.

The gang specialised in the “illegal traffic in greenhouse gas refrigerants” that damage the ozone layer, said a police spokesman.

The gang brought the gases in from China at the port of Valencia on Spain’s east coast, passing it off as being intended for other destinations such as Jordan, said the statement.

In fact, the refrigerant gases stayed in Spain and were sold in various regions across the country.

The gang exploited the fact that European businesses have the right to transit goods imported from non-EU countries through EU territory — where they are intended for a third country — without having to pay customs duties.

They set up a ghost company in Portugal that was the fictional recipient of the gases from Spain, in case customs agents inspected their goods, said the police statement.

The gas was in fact being sold on the black market in Spain at about three times less than the normal market price.

The gang had got out of paying import duty and paying the tax applied to the European market for carbon quotas, as well as a Spanish tax on greenhouse gas refrigerants.

Spain’s treasury estimates that the fraud cost the taxpayer €3.5 million in tax revenue.

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Spain investigates mysterious 'needle spiking' attacks on women in nightclubs

The worrying trend of ‘needle spiking’ (pinchazos in Spanish) in bars and nightclubs that has been seen across Europe in recent weeks has reached Spain.

The strange attacks, the first of which reportedly happened in October 2021 in the Scottish city of Dundee, can cause sudden dizziness, memory loss and then, usually the morning after, bruises caused by what experts believe are needle pricks.

In Spain, the first reports of these needle spiking attacks have been in the Basque Country, Catalonia, Andalusia, Aragon and Cantabria.

The Ertzaintza (Basque police) are investigating as many as a dozen neede spikings in bars and restaurants across the northern region in the last two weeks alone, while national police in Andalusia are investigating two women claiming to have been victims of ‘chemical submission’ due to needle spiking in a nightclub in El Puerto de Santa María in Cádiz.

Catalonia and the Basque Country are the regions where the largest number of cases have been reported so far, and the complaints are familiar: young women who feel a prick or sharp pain while dancing or waiting at the bar in a cramped environment, and then feel dizzy and disorientated and have a physical injection mark on their body.

Often the needle pricks are accompanied by memory loss.

Social panic

Worrying though the attacks are, it must be noted that scientists have only detected one case in Spain (in the northern region of Asturias) where the victim’s body was found to have a toxic substance present.

The victim in question was a minor, so it is unclear if they were in a bar or nightclub at the time. The 13-year-old girl reported a sharp pain in her leg, and later tested positive for liquid ecstasy after analysis at the Cabueñes Hospital.

But this seems to be the exception.

Physical needle pricks without any chemical or toxic traces have been the case in almost every other case across Europe.

By January 2022, in Britain there had already been already 1,300 complaints about needle attacks. Of these, zero cases were confirmed with chemical evidence.

In France, of 800 or so reported needle spiking cases, not a single chemical trace was found in any of the victims tests.

In the medical analysis of Spanish victims, according to police sources, no traces of toxic substances have been found besides the single case in Dijon.

Mireia Ventura, head of analysis at Energy Control, said in the Spanish press this week that “we do not deny that there are aggressions with something sharp, but this story that they [the victims] are inoculated drugs with a syringe in nightclubs sounds fanciful to us, there are several pieces that do not fit in.”

Not a single syringe has been found on any premises nor have any culprits been identified.

None of the dozens of recent victims in Spain have tested positive for toxic substances in medical tests, nor have they suffered sexual assault, harassment or theft.

As sociologist Robert Bartholomew wrote in ‘Psychology Today’, “anyone who believes she was drugged while on the go must be taken seriously and her claims thoroughly investigated. However, a recent wave of news involving syringes has all the characteristics of a social panic.”

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