Inquiry in all out bid to curb transit fraud

Date: 29/02/1996

MEPs investigating transit fraud in the Union are casting the net as wide as possible in their search for detailed evidence on the mounting challenges facing the multi-billion-ecu sector.

It is the first parliamentary committee to open a mail box on the Internet, and it is also placing a notice in the EU's Official Journal requesting information from individuals and outside bodies as it experiments with a range of new techniques to help MEPs in their work.

The inquiry has already received written submissions from freight forwarders and tobacco retailers, both of whom face major financial losses when deliveries of goods are diverted to the black market instead of reaching their stated destination.

The special committee, under the chairmanship of British Socialist MEP John Tomlinson, has spelt out the objectives of its year-long investigation to EU ambassadors in Brussels, specifically requesting the cooperation of national authorities.

“We hope they will let people know about the committee so we can get the widest possible evidence. We have asked them to produce a number of pieces of information on the basis of individual responses from individual experience. Woe betide any government that tries to hide behind anonymity,” Tomlinson said afterwards.

After hearing evidence during the past week from the European Commission and Bernhard Friedmann, the president of the EU's Court of Auditors the inquiry will determine the specific areas which it plans to investigate in the coming weeks .

Among the questions to which Tomlinson is seeking answers is what political and legal basis was used in deciding to extend the transit system to Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland this year, at a time when arrangements cannot even cope with the demands in western Europe.

The Commission is equally involved in the bid to clamp down on practices which have robbed the annual EU budget of some 800 million ecu since 1990 and left the freight-forwarding industry facing demands of up to 8 billion ecu to compensate for unpaid taxes and excise duties.

Last week it announced a 23-million-ecu programme, jointly funded by member states and the Union, to computerise a system which now handles on paper up to 20 million separate documents a year.

It hopes the project, which will put authorities into direct contact with each other, will be up and running by 1998. But industry sources warn that the programme is already several months behind schedule.

The inquiry committee can be contacted by e-mail on: cominq@gw.europarl.org