Employee arrested during booze bust
Three facing charges after more than $100,000 of alcohol found at Delta home
A B.C. Liquor Distribution Board employee’s job may be on the rocks after their arrest in relation to the theft of more than $100,000 of booze.
The employee was one of three people arrested after Vancouver police executed a search warrant at a Delta home last week and found “cases and cases” of hard liquor, said Jason Doucette, a VPD spokesman. All three have been released pending charge approval, he said.
Doucette said police are looking into where the pinched hooch was destined.
“It’s not personal use,” Doucette said, with a laugh.
“We can only assume that these types of thefts are driven by greed and financial gain.”
He said it’s never too late to include the intended recipient in the police’s package to Crown counsel.
The liquor board’s corporate-loss prevention team first twigged to the missing bottles while running through the inventory at the board’s Vancouver warehouse at East Broadway and Rupert Street, said Viviana Zanocco, a communications
manager for the board.
Team members called the VPD in April to air suspicions as to what they believed was happening, then
police and the loss team worked together to gather evidence.
The warehouse is equipped with closed-circuit cameras, Zanocco
said.
Last week, investigators witnessed an alleged offence, then police followed a vehicle to the Delta home where the stolen alcohol was recovered.
The liquor-board employee, who neither police nor the board would identify, has been suspended, Zanocco said. Two of those arrested are Surrey residents and the third is from Delta, according to police.
While the liquor board doesn’t capture numbers on employee theft, it does measure “shrinkage” — the loss of inventory to internal theft, shoplifting, damage and cashier errors, among other things, Zanocco said.
In 2017-18, the liquor board recorded 0.07-per-cent shrinkage on sales of more than $2.4 billion, she said. For reference, that compares with a U.S. retail-industry average of 1.44 per cent of sales, Zanocco said, pointing to a recent National Retail Security Survey conducted by the University of Florida and the National Retail Federation.
Doucette said he couldn’t recall having dealt before with a haul of this magnitude.
Police are continuing to work with the liquor board to determine whether there were other offences.