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News
Dock worker arrested in DRC theft case
A stevedore at the French port of Le Havre has been arrested for his alleged role in the theft of over 100 bottles of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti from a container last year.
Over 30 cases of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti destined for Canada were reportedly stolen from their container in Le Havre last October as they waited for their shipment to Ontario.
The wines arrived in November and it was then that the Liquor Control Board of Ontario reported that the shipment was 31 cases short.
The theory that the wines were stolen while sitting on the dockside in Le Havre was strengthened when police discovered a link between a collector in Bordeaux and a dock worker in the port.
The link was discovered after a fine wine collector spotted an ad for two magnums of 2012 Romanée-Conti (priced at €48,000) on the popular French website ‘Leboncoin’, which made him suspicious.
Anti-fraud police from Paris and Dijon mounted a sting operation which led to the arrest of two men in Paris. They in turn incriminated a collector in Bordeaux who, as well as having four other bottles of missing DRC in his possession, was acquainted with a stevedore in Le Havre.
The collector (described occasionally as a ‘négociant‘ in some sources) was “quickly found to be innocent”.
As has been widely reported in the French press, the docker in question, aged 34, was subsequently arrested around 15 December and interrogated by police in connection with the robbery.
Local French news site Paris-Normandie reported that more wines were found at his home and that he professed himself a fine wine lover.
The public prosecutor for Le Havre, François Gosselin, said in a statement on 23 December: “At his home a great number of bottles of wine were stored. He had an impressive cellar. He said that he was a wine collector, that he bought it and that he sold it.”
He added that (at that time) no connection between the man’s wines and those stolen had been established.
The investigation is on-going.
This is not the first time fine wine has been stolen from a container at Le Havre. In 2012 880 cases of Dom Pérignon worth over €400,000 were stolen from an industrial park in Rogerville-Oudalle near the port.
The thieves were sentenced and jailed in 2014.