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Victoria Mindova

Accounting offices in Greece and Bulgaria are helping truck and tank drivers to open fictitious companies in Blagoevgrad and Petrich in order to evade law and taxation. This is what the president of the federation of Greek transporters Apostolos Kenanidis, who made an open address to the media to give publicity to the problem, has stated. According to the federation data, over 4,000 trucks and 500 companies owned by Greeks have been registered in Bulgaria in recent years after the country's entgry into the European Union. Almost all of these companies are operating on the edge of the law and some of them even beyond it with the sole purpose of undercutting the price of services offered.

"Greek owners of transport companies open fictitious firms in Bulgarian towns near the border with Greece to be able to evade the tax law. The problem is not that they open central offices in Blagoevgrad for example, but that the trucks never cross the border to register; they never pass the mandatory roadworthiness test and are never inspected by the inspection services to detect irregularities," Kenanidis told GRReporter.
 
Specific accounting offices that advertise their activities play a key role in opening a central office of Greek truck owners with Bulgarian registration. The president of the federation said that their ads are published in specialized magazines for forwarding or on websites with similar content. "Against a fee, these companies offer to prepare all necessary documents, to issue permits of activity and certificates for roadworthiness tests without the vehicle ever crossing the border. As you can see, this involves a combination that has the sole purpose of circumventing the law."

The president of the federation explained that those colleagues, who are in the shadow of the law, are working primarily on the commercial routes from Greece to Italy. "There controls are more flexible, if we can put it like that," said the professional driver pointedly. He stressed that a truck with fake documents can easily pass through these checkpoints unnoticed. Kenanidis argues that Greek drivers with questionable Bulgarian registrations often register a load worth, say, three thousand euro, for five thousand euro. They make an average of 250-300 runs and at the end of the year report in Bulgaria only 15-20 runs. "The problem is that there is no control system to crosscheck the data and identify these violations."

Kenanidis explained that the management of the federation has first-hand information about the abuse. "These are our colleagues. We are working together with them. Moreover, the ads of those intermediary agencies that perform these services can be seen everywhere."

Since the problem has become almost pandemic, the federation of Greek transporters has turned to the Greek Ministry of Transport for help. A working group of experts from Greece requested a meeting with field representatives and the Bulgarian Ministry of Transport in Sofia, where they presented the problem. "You know that this combination they have created is to the detriment of both countries," urged the president of the Greek federation. In his opinion, the meeting with the Bulgarian counterparts will not be very effective, because the representatives of the Ministry of Transport have admitted that they cannot do much about it. "They have only pledged that in renewing the licenses of commercial vehicles, tax and customs offices will make a check - this is quite unsatisfactory," said Kenanidis. The solution found during the meeting in Sofia last week does not solve the problem according to the Greek federation, because professional drivers’ licences are renewed every five years. "So, do we have to wait five years for someone to evade the law and inspect him then?," Apostolos Kenanidis concluded rhetorically.