A local court in China's southwestern Yunnan Province will hear the largest ever case of making and selling fake receipts on Friday after more than 1 million bogus receipts worth 1.05 trillion yuan (147.3 billion U.S. dollars) were confiscated.

"It is the largest case of making and selling fake receipts since 1949, according to the Ministry of Public Security. The fake receipts that were confiscated could load two trucks," said Chai Jiaping, Qujing Municipal Public Security Bureau deputy head, on Thursday.

Five suspects have been arrested and will be tried on Friday morning in Luoping County people's court, a subsidiary of the Qujing municipal court.

Luoping County police found 128,300 fake receipts worth 18.7 million yuan on a coach heading from Xingyi County in Guizhou Province to the Yunnan provincial capital, Kunming, on the evening of Aug. 17.

"The fake receipts look almost the same as the real ones. Consumers and even the tax collectors find it hard to distinguish, " said Tang Xiaozhou, Luoping County Administration of Taxation head. "If put into the market, the national treasury will lose more than 75 billion yuan in tax revenue."

Police searched the house of consignor Yang Wenbin the next morning and found 72,700 fake receipts worth 36 million yuan, as well as computers and scanners for making the bogus receipts.

They then destroyed a workshop making the fabricated receipts in Xingyi on Aug. 22, where 400,000 receipts worth 611 billion yuan were found. Two suspects there fled the scene.

Police later caught the two and another consignor, Luo Wenjie, in September in Kunming where they confiscated fake receipts worth 192.5 billion yuan.

Zhang Huilong, who provided fake receipts to Luo, was caught in Guangzhou in October. The last principal suspect, Yang Wenbin, was arrested in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, in January.

Li Linjun, the State Administration of Taxation (SAT) spokesman, said last month the SAT would work with police to further crackdown on fake receipts this year to prevent tax evasion and fraud.

China's total tax revenues surpassed 4.9 trillion yuan in 2007, up 30 percent year on year.

(Xinhua News Agency February 22, 2008)