Indian brewers raided after AB InBev spilt beans on cartel
The brewing giant discovered the price-fixing with Carlsberg and United Breweries in India after its SABMiller purchase in 2016, and blew the whistle
New Delhi — An Indian anti-trust probe of beer price-fixing allegations was initiated after Anheuser-Busch InBev told the authorities last year it had detected an industry cartel, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters. AB InBev, the world’s largest brewer, discovered that the Indian operations it acquired as part of its $100bn acquisition of London-listed rival SABMiller in 2016 had for years fixed beer prices along with Denmark’s Carlsberg and India’s United Breweries, which is part-owned by Heineken, the sources said. AB InBev conducted an internal investigation in the first half of last year, after closing the SABMiller deal, and found that executives had discussed and agreed on their submission of ex-brewery beer production prices to Indian state governments. Those ex-brewery prices would include all the production and marketing costs, as well as a proposed profit margin, and were used by state governments to set a maximum retail price. “It was startling,” one of th...
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