Lodge a complaint to Brussels re Guinness price hike

national | consumer issues | news report Thursday May 27, 2004 15:46 by Eoin Dubsky info at votedubsky dot com 087 6941060, 055 25176

I today lodged a formal complaint with the Irish Competition Authority and the EU Directorate General for Competition regarding excessive pricing, following Diageo's announcement to increase the price of Guinness. The multinational drinks company announced yesterday that they would increase the wholesale price of Guinness in Ireland by 6c as of next Tuesday, 1 June 2004. I would encourage people to write, email and phone the authorities, who are supposed to protect consumers from such behaviour by large corporations.

On 1 April Diageo dropped the wholesale price of Guinness for the Czech Republic, where they face stiff competition from local brands, and imports Heineken and Murphy's Irish Stout. They also announced in April that they will close the Park Royal Brewery in London, laying off 200 workers. You would expect that this would result in cost savings, which could be passed on to the consumer. There is no excuse for this price hike.

The EU has passed sound consumer protection and competition law, which should benefit everyone in the EU. Irish competition legislation obviously isn't working though, if large corporations can abuse their market position like this. Diageo were fined $2m for breaking competition laws in Venezuela recently. They shouldn't be allowed run roughshod over consumer rights here.

For all the talk about 'rip-off Ireland' from the big political parties and other Euro candidates, there has been precious little done to tackle multinational corporations like Diageo and Microsoft, who have been found in breach of competition laws all over the world. The corporate media have been covering the Guinness price hike story as if it were something uncontrollable or inevitable. In a way it is inevitable, I'd agree, because anyone with the sort of market dominance which Diageo enjoys, and the access to political power which they exercise, is going to rip off consumers. If you visit my website (address below) you can see the complaint which I sent, and contact details for you to make your own complaint if you like.

The other day I was at a talk by Richard Stallman in Trinity College about software patents. It's the same thing over and over: the government just parrot whatever they're told by this multinational corporation or the other. They in turn control markets and tax citizens, just as Mussolini had envisioned it: "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power." – Benito Mussolini (cited by Lewis Lapham in Harper's, January 2002).