 | E-Malt.com News article: The Netherlands & Russia: Heineken still present in Russian market with shares in two beverage companies
Heineken is still present in the Russian market with shares in two beverage companies, Follow the Money reported on May 1, despite promises to withdraw completely from the country after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The beer company owns 25% of Grand and Grand East, which are both Russian subsidiaries of the Mongolian beverage group APU, documents available via the Dutch Chamber of Commerce show. Heineken also has a stake of the same size in APU itself.
Heineken CEO Dolf van den Brink said that “we didn’t know we had these stakes”, when questioned after the company’s annual shareholder meeting in April by Follow the Money.
In 2023, Follow the Money reported that Heineken launched 61 new products on the Russian market since the start of the Kremlin’s invasion a year before, partly as an alternative to other brands such as Guinness and Coca-Cola, which had left. This was despite earlier promises to cease operations in Russia.
Months after that report, Heineken announced it had fully withdrawn.
But its shareholdings list, which in the Netherlands is an overview of all subsidiaries and companies in which the parent company holds at least a 20% stake, still tells a different story.
By law, companies must file such a list annually with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce, but Heineken had failed to do so since 2020. Follow the Money discovered this during an investigation into Heineken’s activities in Iran, where the brewer discreetly produced alcohol-free beers between 2018 and 2025.
According to the CEO, Heineken’s failure to meet the legal obligation to file the shareholdings list was “an omission”, caused by a flawed handover during the COVID-19 pandemic. “It simply wasn’t on our radar,” he said.
Van den Brink added: “We only noticed [the Russian stake] ourselves when we went through the list carefully. This is in no way a disguised attempt to still profit from Russia; we gain no commercial or strategic advantage from it.”
He said he did not know what Grand or Grand East do as companies. “Something administrative? I have no idea. I’ll have to ask APU. You can do that yourself as well.”
An online search shows that Grand and Grand East are, respectively, a distributor and a wholesaler of beer, vodka, and other beverages. These are produced by the Mongolian company APU.
From the Siberian cities of Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk, Grand and Grand East distribute beverages across Russia.
If these companies pay out profits to their shareholders, Heineken benefits. From publicly available information it is not clear whether the companies pay out dividends or reinvest the profits.
In relation to the Iran controversy, Vincent Kiezebrink of the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO) said that it would be “strange” for a company as large as Heineken to make a mistake in filing the shareholdings list.
At Heineken’s annual shareholders’ meeting, external auditor Han van Delden of KPMG said that “someone” had “forgotten” to file the list. KPMG had only been auditing the company for the past year, he said.
The company’s previous auditor, Deloitte, declined to comment.
Heineken said it submitted its 2025 shareholdings list – which details the Russian holdings – to the Dutch Chamber of Commerce in April, followed by the other missing submissions from 2021 to 2024. The Chamber of Commerce said it had yet to receive the filings for 2021 to 2024.
Heineken said it had reported the “omission” to file the list to the Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets, which, according to Van den Brink, responded leniently.
The CEO said the regulator did not consider it necessary for Heineken to retroactively file the older lists. Van den Brink said he nevertheless instructed his accountants to do so.
Van den Brink is set to stand down as CEO of Heineken at the end of May, after nearly three decades at the company including six at its helm. His successor has yet to be announced.
01 May, 2026
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