from Louis Ferrarella
The two giants of porterage services investigated for evaded VAT. The role of their partner Antonio Suma, according to the investigators de facto administrator of 20 “manpower tanks”
One hundred and two million euros were seized on Wednesday morning by the Guardia di Finanza in Milan from two logistics giants in Italy, both French-owned, the group Brt-Bartolini (44 million) and Geodis Cl Italia spa (37 million), as well as their partner Antonio Suma (21 million) as de facto administrator of about twenty coops, in execution of a preventive seizure decree issued by the Milanese prosecutor Paolo Storari for the issue of invoices for non-existent operations aimed at VAT evasion. Brt-Bartolini (1.7 billion in turnover and over 5,000 workers in the group controlled by the French post office two years ago) and Geodis Cl Italia spa (Italian division with a turnover of 273 million and almost 4,000 workers in a transalpine group) are investigated as companies on the basis of law 231 of 2001 on crimes committed by top management in the interest of companies, in which they are consequently investigated as natural persons signatories of the 2017-2021 tax returns (Giorgio Bartolini and Costantino Dalmazio Manti for Brt, and Luigi Francesco Cazzaniga and Fabrizio Airoldi for Geodis). Updates on the story in this article.
The simultaneous searches carried out by the GdF together with INPS and the Revenue Agency bring to light the new episode of an attempt by the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which has been underway for a couple of years now, to reclaim a market sector altered by the short circuit between clients, filter consortia and reservoir cooperatives of labor at bargain prices because they were “doped” by circumventing the tax authorities. A model that has always appeared the same, in recent months in DHL or GLS already the subject of similar investigations, now in Bartolini and Geodis: apparent cooperatives – which in reality are labor tank companies that are born, die, do not pay VAT, manipulate pay slips, and the workers are passed around as in a transhumance – they issue invoices to filter companies, usually consortia with no workers who, however, re-invoice the alleged services to the final customers, i.e. to the clients. Who profit from the benefits of this system because in this way they neutralize their tax wedge through the outsourcing of labor and related charges, practiced with fictitious “contracts for the provision of services” which in reality conceal the mere “administration of personnel” in violation of the related discipline.
So the customer boosts the workforce without the need to really hiresave on labor costs, and outsource all the dynamics, costs and tensions of work relationships, starting with union relations.
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