The defensive pleas of the defendant at the hearing in the offence of tax evasion (art. 66 Code of Tax Procedure)

Legal Insight

September 2022

Christina Kapourani, M.Sc. (mult.), Pgcert, PhD Cand.

Summary: The criminal offence of tax evasion, as the more specific cases are standardized in article 66 of the Code of Fiscal Procedure (especially after the amendments of Law 4337/2015), is one of the most frequent economic offences that we encounter in the criminal courtrooms every day. Below we will try, briefly, to describe the main defensive claims (independent or not) that the defendant of this offense may raise (such as, for example, the inadmissibility of the prosecution due to deficiencies at its initiation, the statute of limitations of the offense, or the existence of a precedent from the imposition of a previous administrative sanction of a criminal nature, the statute of limitations of the public tax right, and so on). These pleas may also be raised at the hearing, forming the relevant defence at the hearing.

Ι. Introduction - Description of the offence and criminal treatment: