A Ukrainian wine company is standing to make a loss of up to £100,000 after a robbery in London.
More than 3,000 bottles transported from vineyards across Ukraine to the UK, via Dover, were stolen from their lorry, which was parked overnight at a car park in Ripple Road, Barking.
Tania Olevska, manager at Ukrainian Wine Company UK, told Metro that as many as five pallets of merchandise – mostly sparkling wine – was reloaded onto a mini-bus and stolen.
She said: ‘When the driver saw that the lorry had been broken into, he then called the Metropolitan Police, but they said that if no one was injured, they will not come.’
Although there is CCTV footage of the theft, the Metropolitan Police is understood to have already told Ukrainian Wine Company UK that they will not be proceeding with the case due to insufficient evidence and leads.
The losses amount somewhere between £72,000 and £100,000 – a huge amount during the company’s second year of trade.
The incident happened overnight on October 13, and the wine company has since issued a warning to its customers to watch out for Ukrainian bottles of wine being resold.
Tania claimed that one of the 3,000 bottles was spotted being resold at a carboot stall in Dagenham, only one week after the robbery.
In a post on Instagram, the company appealed to its customers to look out for certain bottles.
‘This has affected us so much. Boxes of Kolonist wines that were stolen were totally sold out – so we do not have any of their wines in our stock,’ Tania added.
‘We work with restaurants and bars, so a lot of places were waiting for us, and they are some of our bestsellers. So we are losing our clients at the moment and money.
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‘We are rearranging the delivery and it is very complicated. The prices are high and it takes around 10 days to deliver from Ukraine. Some of the wine producers we work with are small, so they do not have infinite stock.
‘We hope that we won’t have to close as we still have some stock here in the UK. But we only opened two years ago.’
Metro has contacted the Metropolitan Police for a comment.
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