EU warns China imports scam may involve Piraeus

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – European Union anti-fraud investigators suspect Greece and Hungary may have become the main EU centers of a multi-million-euro scam involving imports of Chinese clothing and footwear that uses the infrastructure of China’s new “Silk Road.” The large-scale fraud, which involves underdeclaring the value of imported goods to pay lower duties and sales taxes, was first uncovered in Britain, where it had gone on for years, prompting the European Commission this year to demand that London pay 2.7 billion euros in lost customs duties to the EU budget. Officials at the EU anti-fraud agency OLAF said they now suspected the scam could have shifted to Hungary and to the port of Piraeus near Athens, which has been majority-owned by China’s stateowned Cosco Shipping since 2016. Hungarian and Greek customs data show a surge of undervalued clothing and footwear imports from China over the past two years, OLAF officials told Reuters. They stressed that this trend had coincided with a drop in undervalued Chinese imports into Britain. Reuters exclusively reported in April that Italian authorities were investigating suspected import fraud by Chinese criminal gangs at Piraeus port, the largest in Greece. Asked about the suspected fraud in April, Cosco said, “The company has in its global operations consistently and strictly followed local and international laws, and persevered to operate legally and compliantly.”