• Carbon trading abuses suspected last summer
• Connie Hedegaard failed to act promptly, allege critics
Confidential documents show that Connie Hedegaard, the European commissioner for climate action, had been informed about fraudsters targeting the Danish carbon registry to enable them to trade in credits last summer, as the UK and the Netherlands were clamping down on the fraud by scrapping VAT on carbon trading.Denmark is now at the centre of a Europol investigation into carbon fraud worth €5bn (Ł4.3bn). An estimated 116 arrests have been made so far, around 30 of them in the UK.
Previously, Hedegaard had denied knowing about the suspected fraud until a Danish newspaper reported it in December. "I was never informed about this until last autumn when Ekstra Bladet looked into the fraud".
But the confidential climate ministry report entitled VAT Fraud in the European CO2 Quota Register Including the Danish, appears to have been signed with Hedegaard's initials, indicating she was made aware of the problem in August last year.
"The tax department this spring became aware of fraud in the EU with VAT in connection with trade of CO2 quotas and credits. In particular Denmark seems to be the target of VAT fraud," it said.
An appendix attached to the report also dated in August from the Danish tax authorities said that suspicious trades had been identified, most of them linked to the UK. "For now we have two cases with an estimated loss in total of 3.8m Danish kroner [Ł440,000]. The trades are primarily performed by UK operators with Danish VAT numbers."
"There is still no clear image of how the fraud is organised, but there has been the common feature that the companies involved in the first suspicious transactions were companies from other EU countries that merely held accounts in the Danish quota registry."
Read more at The Guardian
Shame on Denmark. This country is stealing in huge style, anything is available (even children).
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