Black market rentals, 6.6 million business in Turin with fraud and money laundering

Flats, garages, parking spaces, attics, cellars and various rooms, all of which were rented out. But with a common denominator: the rents were all strictly collected in cash, or rather in black. Something like 1,500 cadastral plots identifying a string of real estate properties all traceable to a single individual who appeared as direct owner or through companies of various kinds, even structurally interposed between them. The Provincial Command of the Turin Finance Police, coordinated by the Turin Public Prosecutor's Office, turned a spotlight on the activities of a well-known Piedmontese real estate entrepreneur for the tax years from 2019 to 2022. And they saw right through it, at least according to the initial evidence that emerged from the investigations conducted by the Italian Finance Police. So much so, that with three separate preventive seizure decrees issued as a matter of urgency by the Public Prosecutor of the Piedmontese capital (all then validated by the competent Judge for Preliminary Investigations of the local Court), tax fraud was ascertained, for a total amount of approximately EUR 6.6 million, and self-laundering activities for approximately EUR 540 thousand. Not only. With the help of canine units, the best-known 'cash dogs' on customs patrol, the Guardia di Finanza, at the suspect's home, seized 'over 270 thousand euro in cash, cleverly concealed, even in false bottoms obtained in the furniture,' a Gdf note explains.

The first alerts emerged with the investigations carried out during 2022 by the investigators of the Turin Local Police Department, which (with its Civil Protection, Security and Emergency Division) constantly monitors buildings where situations of discomfort of civil coexistence and urban security are reported. Not only. The local administration's monitoring ranges from checking the regularity of construction, conformity and safety of the technological systems serving the building units, the hygiene conditions of the flats and the legitimate right of the inhabitants to occupy the individual flats.

Routine checks that got the Turinese entrepreneur who had come under the lens of the Fiamme Gialle into trouble, in particular for anomalies in the lease contracts and rent payments between the owners (represented by societies or social promotion associations) and the people who occupied the properties. It was easy, with the databases and the computer backbone available to the Guardia di Finanza, to cross-reference different information such as lease contracts, property ownership, rents paid and utilities. The tax evasion uncovered by the Gdf mainly concerned properties rented out in the urban areas of the city of Turin considered to be the most 'delicate', those areas destined to be rented out, and as the Fiamme Gialle themselves point out, 'sometimes even in precarious conditions, to people belonging to the weaker segments of the population, primarily non-EU citizens'. All this often with contracts found to be registered in the name of persons other than the actual tenants.

For the Turin Public Prosecutor's Office and the Gdf, the suspect's activity - 'without prejudice, of course, to the presumption of innocence until liability is fully established' - was particularly insidious. Repeatedly misleading the tax authorities, making the contested tax evasion a crime of fraud, was the shielding of his property management activities with an instrumental constitution and interposition of numerous legal entities, of various natures, even up to 18 different legal entities including limited liability companies, limited partnerships, simple societies, social promotion associations, cooperatives, sole proprietorships, all lacking 'structures and organisation independently capable of producing income', explain the GdF. All in order to hide undeclared or 'black' property rental fees from the tax authorities.

The investigative activity was also aimed at reconstructing, through the bank documentation acquired during the investigation, the monetary flows correlated to the 're-introduction' into the financial market of the aforementioned criminal profit, i.e. the forms of employment in economic, financial or entrepreneurial activities of the illicit tax savings. Through the meticulous reconstruction of the purchases of financial instruments made during the period of interest, it was possible to identify the investments in financial activities that the entrepreneur was able to make thanks to the reconstructed tax evasion, with the consequent charge also of the conduct of self money laundering. The profit derived from this further offence, equal to the coupons, dividends and capital gains received on the securities portfolio formed from the investment of the proceeds of tax evasion, was quantified at approximately EUR 540,000.