MILAN — Amazon Italy raids have hit Amazon. Com Inc.’s Milan office and its huge logistics center in the town of Cividate al Piano, where Italian tax and customs police impounded about 5,000 items made in China as well as IT equipment in a probe linked to an alleged €1.2 billion VAT evasion scheme, prosecutors told Reuters on Monday, Nov. 24, 2025.
Dozens of Guardia di Finanza officers and customs police raided the Cividate al Piano center in Bergamo, in northern Italy, conducting searches and seizures that included toys, mobile-phone covers, air fryers, pens, and scissors believed to have been imported at false values; investigators at the Milan site seized computer equipment and “dissected” internal flows of goods.
Prosecutors say the raids mark a new prong in a wider customs and tax investigation: that Amazon’s marketplace is being used almost like a Trojan horse, sneaking untaxed Chinese-made goods into the European Union by an undisclosed route, eschewing normal checks, then feeding into Italy to be sold through Amazon without paying either customs duties or value-added tax.
The smuggling theory comes from a Milan prosecutors’ tax investigation into whether Amazon’s Luxembourg-based European unit and three of its managers failed to make sure Italy collected about €1.2 billion in value-added taxes on online sales to Italian customers in 2019 through last year — a case that could expand to around €3 billion when including fines and interest, according to a Reuters report in February.
During that first phase of the probe, Italy’s tax police had looked at about 7 billion transactions on Amazon’s marketplace and determined that some €1.2bn in VAT was unpaid, with Chinese vendors responsible for between 70 and 80 percent of goods sold online in the country, according to trade title Retail Systems.
The case is playing out amid broader EU VAT reforms for e-commerce that entered into force in July 2021, which removed tax exemptions for low-value parcels, introduced the Import One Stop Shop system, and placed VAT liability on online marketplaces, making many cross-border consumer sales, according to the World Customs Organization’s summary of the new rules.
Italian and EU prosecutors have also referred to plans to close customs loopholes, which are said to allow such schemes, such as the abuse of Customs Procedure 42, through which importers can delay paying VAT when goods are diverted to another member state. In March, the investigation code-named “Dragone” froze around €71 million tied to a Chinese-run import network, according to the European Public Prosecutor’s Office case summary.
Chinese imports being directed through the Greek port of Piraeus are sold in 14 other EU states after being “undervalued and misclassified”, with full duties or VAT not imposed. European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) investigators have discovered a €700 million fraud. That reflects Brussels’ broader crackdown on low-priced Asian goods.
Italy has fought with Amazon before over tax and competition matters. The company in 2017 agreed to a €100 million settlement to resolve back-tax claims for 2011-2015, a report on that agreement shows. Last year, police had confiscated €121 million from Amazon Italia Transport in a separate tax and labor case, while a court cut but confirmed a €1.13 billion antitrust fine outlined in another Reuters article back in September.
Amazon has declined to comment on ongoing investigations, though it said it was “committed to complying with all applicable tax laws” and that it ranked among the top contributors of taxes in Italy, where the company says it paid more than $1.4 billion in direct and indirect taxes in 2023.
With Eurojust in The Hague already informed, Milan’s prosecutors are hoping the Amazon Italy raids will be only the first stage of a simultaneous Europe-wide initiative, and that both smuggling and tax investigations may expand to include Germany, France, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Belgium, Sweden, and Ireland as investigators unravel supply chains feeding goods into those coun
In a separate but related investigation, the European Public Prosecutor’s Office is examining Amazon’s compliance with value-added tax between 2021 and 2024; Italy’s tax agency offered a settlement proposal of €1.2 billion, which Amazon has until December to respond to.
For Amazon and its rivals, the Amazon Italy raids are a sign that E.U. authorities are becoming more willing to hold marketplaces accountable for products sold on their sites — particularly when the sellers in question were Chinese — and how new regulations could define how digital commerce, customs enforcement, and cross-border tax rules will intersect across Europe for years to come.
