Worried Italians flog off their supercars Police in Milan, Rome and other cities have carried out similar checks, taking down drivers" licenses and number plates and passing them onto tax authorities, who check whether the owners" declared incomes are sufficient to support their extravagant lifestyles. In Florence, tax police stopped a brand new Mercedes and found that it was driven by a builder who declared no tax returns at all and whose wife was on welfare payments. Last year, around 60 used Porsches were exported from Italy each week. That figure has now jumped to around 200. Some owners are so scared of running into spot checks by the tax police that they are asking dealers to come and collect their cars at home. "One client was scared of driving 10 kilometres from his house to here," Lorenzo Schiatti, who owns a Jaguar and Land Rover dealership in Reggio Emilia, northern Italy, told Corriere della Sera newspaper. He was afraid that he'd be stopped by a Guardia di Finanza checkpoint. "We don't have definitive numbers because it is difficult to quantify but it looks like thousands of cars are leaving Italy each month," said Sirio Tardella, the director of Unrae, an association of foreign car manufacturers. Another disincentive to owning a sleek sports car is a new luxury vehicle tax introduced by the government in December, as well as rises in petrol prices. The cars most demand abroad are chunky SUVs such as the Porsche Cayenne, Mercedes ML and BMW X5, according to Pasquale Maione, an Italian dealer based in Munich. Ferraris are also highly prized, he said. Filippo Pavan Bernacchi, the president of Federauto, an association representing dealerships, said owning a luxury car had become "almost a crime" in Italy these days. "Super" Mario Monti, Italy's prime minister, has made a priority of clamping down on tax evasion since he replaced Silvio Berlusconi in November. He needs to chip away at Italy's €1.9 trillion public debt, amid concerns that it could go the way of Greece. But the challenge is enormous - a recent government study estimated that Italy's black economy, which includes evasion of income tax and VAT, amounts to €275bn a year, or 17.5pc of GDP.