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Slovakia’s organized crime bureau arrested 15 suspects and seized more than a dozen bank accounts on Monday, as part of an investigation connected to an alleged subsidy fraud scheme.
The Office for Combating Organized Crime, a division of Slovakia’s National Crime Agency, arrested 15 individuals who allegedly defrauded the EU of roughly 1.77 million euros (US$1.9 million) by fraudulently claiming subsidies on specialized machinery.
According to a statement by the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), between March 2018 and June 2023, the suspects purchased low-cost machinery from China but falsely declared that it was manufactured in the EU. This alleged manipulation of the machinery’s origins ensured that they won the procurement contract, while fraudulently inflating the price up to tenfold.
The group then allegedly falsified invoices for the machinery and sent the tampered records to the Slovak Ministry of Economy for reimbursement, thereby receiving 1.77 million euros in EU funds, EPPO said.
The money was partly taken out of the European Regional Development Fund, a fund designed for infrastructural investments in the bloc’s more underdeveloped regions, thereby allowing those regions to better attract more lucrative private sector investments.
Authorities did not comment on the nature of the group’s infrastructural plans, but they were said to require a multi-layered cast foil extruder and a bag production machine.
In a series of raids across Slovakia’s Žilina and Nitra regions that led to the arrests, police also seized the group’s accounting records, bank accounts, hundreds of thousands of euros, and mobile devices believed to contain incriminating evidence that will help recover the misappropriated funds.
Prosecutors did immediately respond to comment when asked what would become of the machinery or the infrastructure project in question.