A driver from Belgium-based brewing company AB InBev and a liquor dealer from Zaventem stole thousands of litres of Jupiler and Stella by emptying the beer barrels and filling them back up with water.
At a New Year's Eve party in Antwerp four years ago, the only thing coming out of the taps was water after new kegs of Stella Artois were connected. In autumn 2018, a similar situation took place in several pubs and a number of events in the Netherlands, and parties in the United States were even shut down suddenly because the Jupiler barrels turned out to contain water.
AB InBev opened an investigation and soon came to the conclusion that the fault was not in their own breweries: no issues were found during the production process and a mix-up in the distribution centre was also ruled out, Het Laatste Nieuws reports.
What they did find, however, was that the water in the beer kegs had a different composition to the water in the taps of both the Stella and Jupiler breweries. Even more striking was that the kegs filled with water were damaged at the beer handle, meaning that someone had systematically forced the filled kegs open, pumped the beer out and then filled them with water.
Turning beer into water
Eventually, the investigation led to a driver who worked for a subcontracted transport firm for AB InBev and was regularly given orders to pick up beer and transport it to both the distribution centre in the Netherlands and the Port of Antwerp.
A GPS check of the routes showed that he made stops at the warehouse of a liquor dealer in Zaventem and Grimbergen each time.
During searches in 2019 at both addresses, police found several caps of beer barrels of Stella and Jupiler, and some Stella barrels were sealed with Jupiler caps. During an inspection of a beer shipment from the liquor store in Zaventem, 160 barrels of Jupiler were also found without a valid note of lading.
According to both the Public Prosecutor's Office and AB InBev, it is clear that the driver and the liquor dealer were working together, turning the beer into water.
The driver's method was always the same: he drove his truck onto the premises of AB InBev in Leuven and picked up a different trailer loaded with beer to the one he was instructed to take. He would then enter the code for the load that was on his waybill when driving out. Then, he drove to the liquor dealer where the beer was pumped over from the barrels and replaced with water.
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With the barrels filled with water, he drove back to the AB InBev premises, where he said that he had accidentally taken the wrong trailer. After putting the truck with the water-filled barrels back in exactly the same place, he drove away with the cargo he really needed to transport. The dealer, in the meantime, resold the stolen beer to his customers and the two shared the profits.
During transportations from the Jupiler brewery in Liège, however, something went wrong. While the driver did take the "right" truck and replaced the beer with water, the one filled with water somehow still ended up in the possession of the liquor dealer – a mistake that brought the fraud to light.
Both the driver and the liquor dealer will stand trial in the Correctional Court in Leuven on Friday, accused of forcing open and emptied thousands of beer barrels. The two not only risk a prison sentence and a fine, but also face a damage claim of more than €1.4 million.
