The French gendarmerie carried out a crackdown on Monday against a “large-scale” counterfeiting network which sold low-end wines or wines from other regions for Bordeaux. The damage is estimated at ‘hundreds of thousands of bottles’.
On Monday, a hundred gendarmes arrested in the Médoc and in seven departments around twenty people suspected of having taken part in this trafficking in counterfeit Bordeaux wines, the scale of which “can already be estimated at several hundred thousand bottles”, a Public prosecutor Frédérique Porterie told AFP on Friday.
Three of these suspects, including the “main instigator” were presented on Wednesday before an examining magistrate and indicted for “organized gang scams and money laundering”, “deception on the goods” and “falsification of foodstuffs”. They were released under judicial supervision with an obligation to pay bail of 20,000 to 50,000 euros.
While investigating drug trafficking, the gendarmes of the Gironde came across counterfeit material last September, such as “false labels”, detailed the prosecution in a press release.
Then in October, fake Bordeaux wines were spotted in the Sarthe, leading the gendarmes to make the link with a counterfeit reported months earlier in the Médoc.
‘By whole pallets’
The investigation, opened in November, revealed ‘large-scale fraud organized by the owner of a vineyard in the Médoc’, also a merchant, who obtained wine through ‘Spanish contacts’.
He had set up “a network of official and unofficial distributors made up of companies, retirees, auto-entrepreneurs” which made it possible to sell fake Bordeaux “by whole pallets” in several departments, according to the prosecution. “Important orders”, i.e. several thousand bottles, were also “destined for mass distribution or foreign countries”.
Customers thought they were buying Bordeaux châteaux ‘whose name and label inspired confidence, at prices that sometimes defied all competition’ while the bottles contained ‘low-end wines or wines from fairly distant lands’, underlined the prosecutor. During the searches, ‘a dozen vehicles’ and ‘a large volume of wine’ were seized.
/ATS