The president of the French wine producer Raphaël Michel, Guillaume Ryckwaert, has been taken into custody by the police for two days on serious fraud charges. The investigators accuse him of having sold over three million cases of simple table wine of the "Vin de France" classification as premium wines with forged indications of origin, for example from the Côtes du Rhône, Châteauneuf-du-Pape and other AOC regions, for at least three years.
In the meantime he has been released from prison on bail of around one million euros. He is now facing charges of forgery, fraud, tax evasion and breaches of consumer laws. This was reported unanimously by several French media.
The supermarket chain Carrefour, which has been supplied in very large quantities by Raphaël Michel up to now, is said to have cancelled all contracts in the meantime. The "Wine Spectator" reports that the French customs authority Service National de Douane Judiciaire, which also investigates fraud, counterfeiting and tax evasion, accuses the company of "a large number of offences since 2013". It is possible that charges will be brought against other managers of the mass wine supplier.
The listed company Raphaël Michel is one of the largest mass wine producers in France. It has six cellars with a tank capacity of 400,000 hectolitres and a cellar for blending wines with a capacity of 100,000 hectolitres. Raphaël Michel buys grapes from 3,000 winegrowers and 15 cooperatives on the Rhône, in Provence, in Languedoc Roussillon, in Chile and Argentina and also owns large areas of vineyards there .According to investigators ,grape producers should not be involved in the scandal
(uka)