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Five convicted over SVT office party booze

Five members of staff at the Malmö offices of state broadcaster Sveriges Television (SVT) have been found guilty of smuggling alcohol from Germany for an office party.

Published: 11 November 2008 12:07 CET

A sixth suspect was cleared of the charges after she claimed not to remember being involved in planning the party.

The five people convicted of smuggling were all ordered to pay fines by Malmö District Court.

The SVT employees were members of a committee tasked with organizing a party for the premiere of the reality TV programme Riket (Kingdom) on November 10th 2005.

The committee members asked a sixth person, a props manager, to take a company car and travel to Germany to purchase 17 litres of strong liquor, 93 litres of wine and 103 litres of strong beer with licence-payers’ money.

The alcohol was later served in conjunction with a celebratory dinner for 140 people. Any liquor left over after the meal was sold at a makeshift bar.

Since alcohol may only be imported for private use, the court ruled that purchasing alcohol for an office party using company money constituted a commercial transaction and was therefore illegal.

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Spain has second highest rate of daily alcohol drinkers in EU 

More than one in ten Spaniards drink alcohol every day, making them the Europeans who drink most regularly after the Portuguese, new Eurostat data reveals. 

Published: 10 August 2021 14:15 CEST
Spain has second highest rate of daily alcohol drinkers in EU 
Photo: Cristina Quicler/AFP

Thirteen percent of people in Spain drink alcohol every day, a similar rate to Italy, where 12 percent enjoy a tipple on a daily basis, and only behind Portugal, where 20 percent of people have an alcoholic drink seven days a week.

That puts Spaniards above the EU average of 8.4 percent daily drinkers, data published by Eurostat in July 2021 reveals. 

This consistent alcoholic intake among Spaniards is far higher than in countries such as Sweden (1.8 percent daily drinkers), Poland (1.6 percent), Norway (1.4 percent), Estonia (1.3 percent) and Latvia (1.2 percent). 

However, the survey that looked at the frequency of alcohol consumption in people aged 15 and over shows that weekly and monthly drinking habits among Spaniards are more in line with European averages. 

A total of 22.9 percent of respondents from Spain said they drunk booze on a weekly basis, 18.3 percent every month, 12.5 percent less than once a month, and 33 percent haven’t had a drink ever or in the last year. 

Furthermore, another part of the study which looked at heavy episodic drinking found that Spaniards are the third least likely to get blind drunk, after Cypriots and Italians.

The Europeans who ingested more than 60 grammes of pure ethanol on a single occasion at least once a month in 2019 were Danes (37.8 percent), Romanians (35 percent), Luxembourgers (34.3 percent) and Germans (30.4 percent). 

The UK did not form part of the study but Ireland is included. 

Overall, Eurostat’s findings reflect how the Spanish habit of enjoying a glass of wine with a meal or a small beer (caña) outdoors with friends continues to be common daily practice, even though 13 percent does not make it prevalent. 

Spaniards’ tendency to drink in moderation also continues to prevail, even though a 2016 study by Danish pharmaceuticals company Lundbeck found that one in six people in the country still drinks too much. 

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