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It’s uncommon for a con artist to spill their secrets and techniques – particularly one with a prison conviction. However French wine service provider Jean-Sébastien Laflèche is way out of your common fraudster. Having labored in wine because the age of 18, Laflèche was already an outdated hand within the commerce by the point he turned the mastermind behind the biggest wine rip-off in Bordeaux’s historical past.
The 57-year-old was one in every of 5 people convicted in January 2023 by a Bordeaux court docket for a fraud operation that led to hundreds of thousands of litres of low cost Spanish wine being falsely handed off as French, starting from desk wine to well-known appellations like Margaux and Médoc.
Laflèche was given a sentence of two years imprisonment however didn’t spend any time in jail as one yr was suspended and the opposite yr was served sporting an digital tag.
In an interview with Voxeurop, he stated the rip-off had been easy to execute.
“All you need to do is purchase Spanish bulk wine, then mix it. Then you definitely work with a giant vineyard, you get a contract with a giant chain of retailers or supermarkets and promote them wine labelled as ‘Vin de France’,” stated the Frenchman, who was additionally fined €235,000, and banned from working within the wine trade for 5 years. Anyway, Laflèche added, “how do you anticipate a distributor to know if it is fraudulent wine?”
The rip-off ran between 2014 and 2016 in a interval of poor harvests, and concerned not less than 34,587 hectolitres of Spanish bulk wine – the equal of about 4.5 million bottles. The counterfeit wine was then offered to retailers and eating places not simply in France however throughout Europe and additional afield by a wine producer in Bordeaux that ran the swindle together with Laflèche.