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Journalist and economic expert Pano Soko has extracted details from the "Bankers" file, listing the company's abuses over the years in Albania. He has explained the mechanisms of tax evasion, focusing on the manipulation of income and the artificial increase in expenses. According to the journalist, evasion is carried out in two main directions.
"Abuse or evasion occurs on two sides, either on the income side or on the expenditure side," said Soko, adding that companies aim to fictitiously reduce income or increase expenses to avoid profit tax.
He explained that income concealment can be done through intermediate sales between related companies.
“A company tries to hide income by making fictitious sales… passes it on to a related company at a lower price and the profit is shifted,” Soko said, using an illustrative example to explain the scheme.
Soko also mentioned the case of "Bankers", emphasizing that sales were reported lower than the market price.
"Bankers declared 70 percent of sales... while in the 'Brent' market, Albania is also included," he declared.
According to him, another form is inflating expenses through increased billing between related companies.
"As income decreases, expenses increase... a product that costs 500 lek is declared as 2,000 lek," Soko explained, adding that this leads to a decrease in profit and consequently taxes.
Speaking about the investigations, he emphasized that the issue requires great institutional commitment due to the length of time.
"It's about 23 years of history... it requires much greater strength and human capital to investigate ," he said.
Soko assessed that the current investigations are limited to a few specific cases. "With this level of commitment... 2-3 cases will be taken up, but it is not enough to give direction to the Bankers affair," he declared.
He emphasized that the evasion is spread over the years and requires continuous analysis.
"No year is the same as the next... somewhere 100 million, somewhere 10 million, somewhere 200 million are hidden ," said Soko, underlining that a more in-depth and long-term investigation is needed.
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