Toxic vodka warning
Where does Europe’s "Wild East" begin? East of Poland? Or perhaps further to the west, in Germany itself? In early November 2011, German customs officers raided a distillery in the eastern German state of Thuringia, which they suspected had handled and re-sold moonshine from eastern Europe thus defrauding the taxman of EUR 1 million (USD 1.3 million) in excise.
A EUR 1 million tax fraud must be considered peanuts compared to the EUR 230 million tax evasion scheme involving the carbon market that six managers are currently being tried for at a German court. Still, EUR 1 million in un-paid excise translates into almost 80,000 one-litre bottles of vodka. Hardly small fry.
According to media reports, the plant was shut down immediately and the main suspect, a 37-year-old man, was put into custody.
So far so bad. Two weeks later the German Government’s consumer watchdog issued a warning for the brands “Vodka V 24 Original”, “Vodka AntiVirus” and “Premium Vodka Cosmos”, produced by another Thuringian distillery called Bärenkrone ("bear’s crown"), after laboratory tests found that the drinks contained methanol, a highly dangerous type of alcohol that can cause blindness and even death if over-consumed.
Especially, the brand "Vodka AntiVirus" showed circa 17.5 g of methanol per litre, which is about 2,000 times the legal level for methanol in vodka. Anybody drinking half a bottle of this vodka would have been very seriously ill.
The consumer watchdog fears the vodkas have been distributed all over Germany and has banned the brands from further sale.
Both cases beggar belief. How did these two spirits companies manage to stay under the radar despite their allegedly shady dealings? Judging from the accusation of a EUR 1 million excise fraud, the first company in question cannot have been a tiny operator.
The same can be said for Bärenkrone. No German spirits producer had heard of Bärenkrone before the methanol scandal broke. The company never joined the German spirits producers’ association.
Therefore, no one in the industry can tell how much volume Bärenkrone handled, what their plant looked like or what types of drinks they produced apart from vodka. Since this is an ongoing investigation, the authorities will not give any more details away than they already have.
Ultimately, the question is: where did Bärenkrone get its contaminated vodka from or did they add the methanol themselves? Strictly speaking, if Bärenkrone had bought the alcohol from regular suppliers, they would not have had to worry about hazardous levels of methanol. Together with gin, vodka has to meet very high specs in the whole of the EU.
What is more, had Bärenkrone adopted the spirits industry’s high standards, their lab would have easily picked up the polluting methanol.
As usual, it’s only with hindsight that we can see what a funny set-up Bärenkrone was. Its homepage – which has since been pulled from the Web – was written in very bad German (ok, that may not mean much these days) and, even more strikingly, did not reveal who owned the company.
Doing some research on Google, we found out that Bärenkrone itself was owned by another company (same address, though), whose owners run interesting side businesses. Unless there is a mix up with namesakes, one appears to have been Russian-born and has a car dealership, while the other is involved in a trucking company.
Also, some journalists dug up the interesting tit-bit that Bärenkrone’s vodkas were mostly sold to discotheques, where few punters pay any attention to which vodka goes into cocktails, and to kiosks (0.1 litre miniatures, mostly).
This sordid affair shows that there is no need to point fingers at eastern European countries for their high levels of corruption. The idea to make a quick buck by selling dubious vodka seems to have held some appeal to German entrepreneurs too.
