Raed Arafat, head of the Department for Emergency Situations, was summoned on Friday to the Military Prosecutor’s Office attached to the Bucharest Military Court of Appeal in the case in which he is being investigated for smuggling, concerning the purchase of a helicopter from the United Kingdom while avoiding payment of VAT.

At the entrance to the Prosecutor’s Office, Arafat was informed that he had the status of defendant in the case.

‘I have been informed that I now have the status of defendant in the smuggling case—I put that in quotation marks—concerning the helicopter. First of all, as an individual, I have the right to defend myself and I have two limits to my defence. It must be within the law and within the bounds of decency, and I will keep doing so, respecting these two limits,’ Arafat said.

Seventeen people are being investigated in total in this case for committing the offence of smuggling in the forms of co-perpetration, complicity and instigation.

According to investigators, on 2 June 2016, a helicopter belonging to the General Inspectorate of Aviation of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, while on a SMURD mission in the Republic of Moldova, crashed near the village of Haragîș. The accident resulted in the complete destruction of the aircraft and the deaths of the four people on board.

In the process of settling the claim concerning the ‘CASCO insurance – all risks – for helicopters’, the insurer could either pay I.G.Av. the sum of 23,343,667 lei (the equivalent of 5,270,045 euros), or replace the destroyed helicopter with an aircraft in a reasonably similar configuration. The parties agreed that the compensation would be provided by replacing the destroyed helicopter with an aircraft in a reasonably similar configuration, including as regards the medical equipment fitted to the helicopter.

In November 2017, IGAv took delivery of the new helicopter on the island of Guernsey—a territory belonging to the United Kingdom but outside the European Union’s VAT area—and subsequently imported it into Romania. It could be put into operation only after the customs formalities had been completed and the relevant duties had been paid or guaranteed.

The investigation established that the aircraft had been brought into the country and used without these formalities being completed, generating a loss to the state budget in the form of VAT due at customs, amounting to 4,435,269 lei.

‘Consequently, reasonable suspicion emerged that the people involved in the procedure for settling the loss allowed the insurer to discharge its obligation to pay compensation arising from the insurance policy by replacing the helicopter destroyed in its entirety on 02.06.2016 with another helicopter, which did not acquire the status of Romanian goods, for which the customs formalities had not been completed, which had not been granted customs clearance and for which the duties payable at customs, in the form of VAT, had not been paid, amounting to 4,435,269 lei, a sum representing a loss to the state budget and, correspondingly, an undue benefit in the insurer’s assets,’ the Prosecutor’s Office further said.

Source: AGERPRES