Heineken still active in Russia despite claims of total withdrawal
Heineken is still present in Russia despite its announcement in August 2023 that it has completely withdrawn from the country, Follow the Money discovered. The Dutch beer giant is still a shareholder in two companies in Russia, the news site’s journalists discovered from an overview of subsidiaries and joint ventures that Heineken published after inquiries.
Heineken owns 25 percent of the shares in Grand and Grand East, two Russian subsidiaries of the Mongolian beverage group APU, of which Heineken is also a minority shareholder (25 percent).
According to FTM, a basic internet search revealed that Grand and Grand East are respectively a distributor and wholesaler of beer, vodka, and other beverages. The companies distribute their beverages from the Siberian cities of Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk throughout Russia. If Grand and Grand East distribute profits to their shareholders, Heineken benefits.
According to departing Heineken CEO Dolf van den Brink, Heineken is not active in Russia. “We have nothing to do with those Russian holdings,” he told FTM on Thursday, adding that he doesn’t even know what those companies do. “Something administrative? I have no idea,” he said. “To be honest, we didn’t know we had this stake. We only saw it ourselves when we went through the list thoroughly.”
“This is in no way a disguised way to profit from Russia; we gain no commercial or strategic advantage,” Van den Brink said.
The list the CEO referred to is the list of participations, an overview of all subsidiaries and companies in which the parent company holds a share of at least 20 percent. By law, a company is required to file this list with the Chamber of Commerce every year, but Heineken has failed to do so since 2020.
When asked about this, Van den Brink called the failure to file the list of participations “an omission,” caused by a flawed transfer during the coronavirus pandemic. “We didn’t have it on our radar ourselves,” Van den Brink said. “We literally invest in dozens of countries all over the world. In our view, nothing was deliberately withheld here.”
Vincent Kiezebrink of the Foundation for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO) called it “strange” for such a large company to miss something so simple. Heineken either had something to hide or its accountant was asleep at the wheel, Kiezebrink told FTM.
Heineken has since submitted the list of holdings for 2025, which is where FTM found the Russian interests. It also filed these lists for 2021 through 2024. The company reported the omission to the Dutch Authority for Financial Markets (AFM), Van den Brink said.
He also declined FTM’s invitation to do an exit interview - Van den Brink is stepping down as Heineken CEO at the end of May. According to FTM, he feels indignant about FTM’s reporting on Heineken’s departure from Russia. “An interview is not going to happen; I found it too unfair for that.”
In early 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, Heineken announced that it would no longer invest in Russia. FTM later discovered that Heineken launched 61 new products on the Russian market that same year, partly to replace brands that had left the country, like Guinness and Coca-Cola.
