Alt FinMin denies that government intends to abolish SDOE financial crimes squad

Gazzetta team 9 Οκτωβρίου 2015 - 19:25

The SDOE financial crimes squad will neither be abolished nor downsized, while no cases will be written off, Alternate Finance Minister Tryfon Alexiadis stressed in a press conference on Friday.

Clarifying the ministry's decision to transfer responsibility for tax and customs inspections - as well as 500 of the SDOE's 750 employees - to the General Secretariat for Public Revenue, Alexiadis said that the number of permanent positions within the SDOE will remain unchanged at 830.

Responding to the uproar that this decision caused, Alexiadis stressed that the 3,500 cases transferred to the General Secretariat would not effectively change anything and they would still be investigated by tax and customs inspectors.

Alexiadis said that no tax or customs cases will remain at the SDOE, which will occupy itself exclusively with investigations into fraud, economic crime, 'black' money, drugs and arms-dealing. He promised that the issue of reinforcing the SDOE with additional staff will "open" in the coming months.

The minister noted that the SDOE currently had 38,000 outstanding cases involving 1.3 million tax codes and that 11,500 of these - including the notorious Lagarde list - were about to become statute barred at the end of this year. He stressed that this will not be allowed to happen, with the government planning to extend the statute of limitations for these cases by one year so that no case was written off.

Alexiadis announced that a draft bill on undeclared bank deposits will be unveiled next week, while also clarifying details of a proposal to tax property owned by Greek nationals abroad, saying this would be modeled along the lines of the 'Monti' law in Italy.

According to the minister, the latest estimates regarding tax evasion and avoidance in Greece put the figure at around 15-20 billion euros on an annual basis and indications that this involved large companies, not just plumbers and other repair men.

He also announced that the cash registers of many types of business will be directly linked to the finance ministry in October, as well as minor changes to road tax to shift the burden away from smaller, less expensive cars to larger ones.