Operação Admiral's Portuguese Origins Surface in Today's Público Investigation — How a Fafe Smartphone Trail Cracked Europe's €2.9 Billion VAT Fraud and Why the Tribunal da Relação Reset It in February

A long-form investigation published by Público on Sunday, 14 June, finally maps how the largest VAT fraud ever recorded in the European Union — €2.9 billion in lost revenue spread across member-state treasuries — was first cracked open by a Portuguese tax-police probe that began with an inconspicuous Fafe address and a recurring pattern of Amazon smartphone listings.

The case, formally known as Operação Admiral and prosecuted by the Procuradoria Europeia (European Public Prosecutor's Office, EPPO), originated in the Polícia Judiciária's regional Braga unit. Investigators flagged irregular invoicing flows tied to a constellation of intermediary companies, all selling smartphones into Amazon's European marketplace while claiming B2B exemption from value-added tax. The architecture, prosecutors allege, hinged on a single mechanical trick: the genuine customer was an end-consumer who never qualified for the exemption, but the chain of resale companies recorded the transaction as a tax-free intra-EU business sale, pocketing the VAT that should have been remitted to national finance ministries.

The 14 June piece names the alleged central figure as Prathikouhn Lavivong, a Franco-Thai information-systems specialist born in 1990 who moved from Torcy to Portugal in 2016. Lavivong is identified as the architect of the automated false-invoicing engine that allowed the network to scale across nearly 9,000 shell companies registered in 30 jurisdictions, including the United Arab Emirates, the United States and China. Three Portuguese-based associates are also named: Filipe Fernandes (born 1972) as a money-flow co-ordinator, Max Cardoso (French, born 1978) as the front-person recruiter, and Nuno Cancela (Portuguese banker, born 1977), accused of steering compliance officers at Deutsche Bank away from the laundered tranches.

Coordinated raids in November 2022 swept 14 European countries and produced more than 200 search-and-seizure operations in a single day. The Portuguese sub-component — covering 13 corporate defendants and ten individuals — was tried before the Tribunal Central Criminal de Lisboa (Central Criminal Court of Lisbon), which in May 2025 delivered the first sentences: seven years' imprisonment for Lavivong, eight years for Fernandes, seven-and-a-half years for Cardoso and a four-year suspended term for Cancela.

Those verdicts no longer stand. In February 2026 the Tribunal da Relação de Lisboa (Lisbon Court of Appeal) annulled the convictions and ordered the principal defendants released on procedural grounds, citing irregularities in how the trial court had processed evidence during 2025 hearings. The ruling did not absolve the accused; it returned the file to the first-instance court for a fresh verdict against a clean procedural record. Público reports that between 20 and 30 sub-cases continue to spin off from the main investigation, with two parallel operations already booked under the Admiral banner — Admiral 2.0, covering an estimated €297 million Baltic-region exposure, and Admiral 3.0 in Greece, sized at €38 million.

The €2.9 billion headline matters for Portuguese policymakers because the Procuradoria Europeia's caseload tied to Portugal — across Admiral and unrelated operations — now exceeds €952 million in alleged damages under active investigation, a benchmark the EPPO disclosed in March. The April EU agreement to overhaul the bloc's VAT-fraud enforcement architecture, reached in Council on 5 May, was explicitly motivated by the Admiral file. Whether the reset Lisbon trial sticks the second time around will set the precedent the EPPO carries into its 2027 docket.