HCMC court suspends 'faulty beer bottles' lawsuit against brewer Sabeco

The Ho Chi Minh City People’s Court on Tuesday decided to suspend a lawsuit filed by a local resident five years ago against Vietnam’s largest brewer Sabeco for compensation over “faulty beer bottles” due to the plaintiff’s repeated absences.

According to the judges, the plaintiff, Nguyen Phuong Du, residing in HCMC's Go Vap district, asked to postpone the trial on September 12 and his request was accepted. However, on Tuesday morning, his lawyer asked for a further delay because he was busy with another criminal trial.

The judges said the court had summoned Du for a second time, but the reason given by the plaintiff did not fall under force majeure or an objective obstacle to postpone the trial, thus the plaintiff had "given up the right to sue" according to Point c, Clause 2, Article 217 of the Criminal Procedure Code, they said.

"The plaintiff does not have the right to sue again if there is no new evidence from the original filing. The plaintiff has the right to appeal against the court's suspension decision," the jury announced.

In his letter of intention to sue the company, Du said in early September 2018, he bought a 24-bottle case of Sabeco’s Saigon Beer in which he found two bottles were only partially filled, one with half and another with quarter the usual quantity of beer. Furthermore, the liquid inside smelled strange. Both bottles were sealed and carried an expiry date of 2019.

Du suspected the liquid inside the two bottles could be leftover beer or water used to clean the bottles that were sealed and sent to the market through some fault in the production process.

He reported the situation to Sabeco and the company sent a representative to record and verify the complaint two weeks later. He never received an explanation from Sabeco after that.

Du sued Sabeco in 2019, demanding compensation of nearly VND40 million ($1,730 under the then exchange rate), including the value of the beer bottles and VND39.8 million for the "mental suffering" he had to undergo, equivalent to 10 months of the minimum wage stipulated by the government for the Ho Chi Minh City area. He also demanded that Sabeo publicly apologize to him in four major print newspapers for three issues in a row.

Later, he changed his request, demanding compensation of another $1 million. However, in April 2021, he withdrew the extra compensation demand.

Sabeco said the plaintiff's request for $1 million in compensation was “abnormal” and not the act of a normal customer, so it asked the court to transfer the case to investigators to clarify his motive. The company’s lawyer said the beer bottles that Du used to claimed Sabeco’s faults did not have "evident value" as they were not collected legally. All claims made were one-sided, he added.

The lawyer also noted that several tricks were available on the internet, showing people how to take beer from a bottle without opening it.

Du’s lawyer rejected the arguments, saying Du was completely within his rights to sue Sabeco.

A receipt would prove Du bought the beer with the faulty bottles, and as a consumer he had every right to sue the producer, Du’s lawyer said.

Existing laws do not require consumers to provide evidence against producers, and there is no law that says that consumers have to specify why they buy a particular product, he added.

The judges decided to put the trial on hold to collect more evidence, and conduct an examination of the allegedly faulty beer bottles.

According to their latest conclusion in June this year, the labels on the bottles were not printed from a print template.

Thailand's ThaiBev spent almost $5 billion on a 51% stake in Sabeco in December 2017. Its current holding is 64%.