British wine wholesaler to leave UK over post-Brexit paperwork

theguardian.com:

A British wine wholesaler who last year criticised Brexit as the biggest threat to his business in 30 years has decided to leave the UK after post-Brexit paperwork left him with a £150,000 hole in revenue.

Daniel Lambert, who supplies Marks & Spencer, Waitrose and 300 independent retailers, is moving to Montpelier in France later this week with his wife and two teenage children.

There he will set up a French company to export back to his own company in Wales.

He said the only way he could get around the “incredibly complicated” paperwork for importing alcohol was to set up a French company and export into the UK instead and do the paperwork in the EU himself.

“I am doing what the government was suggesting, which is to have a company here and in Europe to mitigate the impact of Brexit,” he said.

“What I’m doing will enable me to import and export into an out of the EU within the company itself, so that we mitigate all of the cost of importing into the UK,” he said.

Daniel Lambert Wines imports more than 2m bottles of wine a year and saw business boom during the pandemic, with revenues up by about £500,000 as locked down consumers replaced the visits to the pub with home supplies.

But the end of the Brexit transition agreement in January ate into any profit with red tape costing his company “between £100,000 and £150,000”, he said.

His Twitter posts about the Brexit regulations have a brisk following among fellow businesses as he was one of the earliest to come to terms with the 200 pages of paperwork per consignment.

“In just one week I will finally leave Brexitland for good. Let me know if anyone ever finds those sunlit uplands. Not expecting an answer anytime soon,” he posted last week.