“We’re holding the man with us and a meeting between him and our prosecutors will take place here as soon as possible,” said Mats Nilsson of Sweden’s Åmål police to newspaper Verdens Gang (VG) on Tuesday evening. The 65-year-old Fallo is a well-known character in the Norwegian press due to his involvement in a smuggling scandal which left 18 people dead after drinking methanol in the early 2000s. In 2005 he was found guilty of five charges of murder by poisoning and one of manslaughter. After two appeals, he was subsequently found guilty of two charges of manslaughter and sentenced to prison for eight years. In a Norwegian documentary from earlier this year Fallo spoke about smuggling as a profession. “You have to be calm and not start groaning and crying if you face a sentence of a year or two,” he said in the documentary, according to VG. After a car chase lasting for an hour and twenty minutes, Fallo was arrested in Strömstad on Tuesday afternoon. When crossing the border between Sweden and Norway, Fallo refused to stop at a routine customs check. He then forced his way into Sweden and led some 10-12 Swedish police cars on a dramatic chase through counties Bohuslän and Dalsland. Fallo finally gave up near Strömstad, while being tailed by two patrol cars. The arrest itself was not dramatic, according to VG. After seizing the vehicle officers subsequently found 567 litres of bootleg vodka in the car.
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Notorious booze baron nabbed at border
After a dramatic car chase, Swedish police on Tuesday afternoon apprehended the well-known Norwegian smuggler Erik Fallo with hundreds of litres of vodka stowed in his vehicle.
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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.
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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