First, there was ClimateGate – the scandal with hacked emails suggesting scientists have abused data for research on global warming. Now, another international climate scandal is emerging that may have an impact on the talks in Copenhagen.
Europes top police body Europol, the closest thing that European Union has to the American Fbi, has exposed a massive fraud with the unions official market in carbon credits, the Emission Trading System.
The fraud is costing tax payers in a handful of European countries more than five billion euro – 7 billion dollars – and raises doubts about the effectiveness of carbon trading as a measure to curb emissions.
Europol director Rob Wainwright issued the following statement:
These criminal activities endanger the credibility of the European Union Emission Trading System and lead to the loss of significant tax revenue for governments.
Police authorities in Belgium, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom have worked together in what Europol calls a process to identify and disrupt the organised criminal structures behind these fraud schemes.
Lets see if we can explain the scheme, using this graphic provided by Europol.
The fraud is based on a what is tax experts and investigators call as a Carroussel fraud with missing traders. This carroussel generates money by stealing value added tax from governments.
The first step of the criminals is to open a trading account with a national carbon registry, in the name of a newly registered company.
From there, this company buys EU emission allowances in another country on one of the six official carbon exchanges in Europe.
After that, these emission allowances are moved to another country, and subsequently sold to an unregulated broker in yet another country.
This broker then charges VAT on these transactions but does not pay the collected VAT to the tax authorities.
Just before the tax authorities realize that this company owes them huge amounts of VAT, basically a period of a few months, the company and its owners disappear.