Spanish police seize 13,000 bottles of counterfeit rum during raids in Andalucía

Guardia Civil officers have seized thousands of litres of counterfeit rum during two searches carried out on industrial estates in Seville province in the Andalucía region.

According to police sources, the value of the seized goods would have exceeded 200,000 euros on the market. All the bottles seized were labelled with the name of a popular brand of rum.

The first search was carried out more than a week ago in a warehouse on the Aerópolis industrial estate in La Rinconada. There, police officers counted 10,656 bottles with counterfeit labels. The warehouse belongs to a Sevillian company that supplies spirits and promotes itself as a great specialist in obtaining stock of brands when there is more demand and the market is more difficult.

The second search was carried out a few days later in another industrial estate, in Dos Hermanas. Guardia Civil officers searched a retail trade supermarket on the Ciudad Blanca industrial estate and detected 2,269 counterfeit bottles of the rum. The establishment is owned by a company from Seville which has its head office there.

The Guardia Civil denounced those responsible for the two companies who are to be summoned as under investigation for crimes against intellectual and industrial property and another for falsification of a public document.

The bottles seized did not contain any alcohol that could pose a risk to public health. However, according to sources close to the case, falsifying labelling and passing off a product as a brand that it is not, is fraud.

The affected brand, had already been at the centre of other operations by the Guardia Civil in Andalucía where a whole network of importers and distributors at a national level has been uncovered along with other well-known brands. The operation started in 2019 when, as on this occasion in Seville, police detected a large consignment of counterfeit bottles in a wholesale factory. That was the first thread they began to investigate until two years later they closed the case that had brought to light a complex business network that was obtaining huge commercial profits with the sale of counterfeit alcohol.

This particular product often travels through different countries to Spain, which makes it even more complicated to track its origin. In the operation, investigators confirmed the liquor was produced in the Dominican Republic, then bottled in Honduras and finally counterfeit labels were affixed in China. In Spain, the product arrived from tax warehouses located in the Netherlands, and once here it was marketed through Spanish distributors. On that occasion, the Guardia Civil acted against 21 companies, several of which were based in Seville.

In 2020, a year before the details of this operation in Andalucía became known, the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF), with the help of the Dutch customs authorities, stopped 147,000 bottles of counterfeit alcohol from leaving for Spain. The operation was carried out two days before Christmas when one of the highest peaks of international demand for spirits occurs.

According to figures from the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EuIPO), EU companies lose around 1.3 billion euros a year to counterfeiting - 4.4% of legitimate sales of spirits and 2.3% of wines are lost annually.

These lost sales translate into the destruction of 4,800 direct jobs in the sector. It is also estimated that, in the EU, these counterfeit products have generated losses of 1.2 billion in tax revenue. According to a EuIPO report, the Spanish manufacturing sector loses 263 million euros annually as a result of counterfeiting.

Sources from the investigation also told SUR's sister newspaper ABC that these counterfeits have a fast introduction rate onto the market and are very difficult to detect by the consumer.