Police take the fizz out of fake drink racket

Four kinds of solutions and essences were found. The entire seizure was valued at Rs.1.5 lakhs by the police. According to the police, the four accused were involved in producing spurious soft drinks like Pepsi, Mirinda, Dukes soda etc. They have been involved in this business for the past 15 years.

Earlier they used to operate from a small makeshift shop at Falkland Road Bombay Central. It was only during the past month and a half that they had rented a small room in the said society. The accused used to sell the spurious drinks at Rs 6 a bottle whereas the original bottles are usually sold at Rs 8 a bottle.

Arif Qureshi, the main accused with his team used to purchase the bottles, the caps and the crates from door-to-door bottle collectors. According to the police they used to purchase essences and flavours from local shops.

According to police sources an entire crate of soft drinks worked out to a cost of Rs 100 for the team. This was sold at the normal price of Rs 216 per crate. Their targeted area, over the past 15 years, has been from Dahisar to Bandra. Sales were around Rs 20,000 per day.

Top police sources suspect the involvement of some local agents from the original drink manufacturers since these drinks were distributed in an identical looking van used by the reputed companies.

Kurne said, “We are trying to establish whether the gang had any more distributors or makeshift factories in any other part of the town. This has been a major breakthrough for us and we expect a major racket to be unearthed.”

The entire operation was sucessfully carried out under the guidance of DCP SS Khemkar, supervision of ACP Ankush Shinde and Madhushudhan Kurne and Police Sub-Inspector Dinesh Shirke and his staff.