Supermarket chain Jumbo has not committed any criminal offenses in sponsoring teams and individual drivers in motor and car sports. This conclusion stems from independent research commissioned by the supermarket chain itself, Jumbo announced on Tuesday when the annual figures were published.
Motorsport sponsorship is one of the subjects on which the criminal case against former Jumbo CEO Frits van Eerd focuses. According to the judiciary, large amounts of money and goods were laundered through sponsorship contracts. The same would have happened through trading in real estate, cars and through ‘unexplained cash deposits’. The main suspect in the trial is former motocross rider Theo Eggens from Drenthe, a close acquaintance of Van Eerd.
After the Public Prosecution Service and the FIOD tax investigation service raided Van Eerd and Jumbo in mid-September, the judiciary already announced that the investigation was not aimed at the company. Nevertheless, the top of the supermarket chain decided to ask consultancy firm KPMG to conduct additional research into the sponsorship agreements. This revealed “no criminal offenses or irregularities”, according to Jumbo.
10 billion
The events surrounding Van Eerd, from whom nearly half a million euros in cash and twenty precious Rolex watches were seized, had “a lot of impact” on Jumbo, the management and supervisory directors write in a joint explanation. The same applies to the death of Karel van Eerd, Frits’ father, in mid-December. Van Eerd senior was the man who shaped Jumbo and allowed it to grow from a regional supermarket chain to the number two in the country.
Jumbo also had highlights in an “exceptional and eventful year”. This is how the family business (100,000 employees) broke through the turnover of 10 billion euros for the first time. That ambition was already expressed four years ago by former CEO Frits van Eerd for 2021. That year, however, Jumbo got stuck just short of that goal, because the turnover of the supermarket sector stagnated in the second half of 2021. This was partly because the country reopened after a year and a half of the pandemic and consumers went out to eat more often again.
A year later, the goal was still achieved: turnover increased by 3.7 percent to 10.3 billion euros in 2022. Jumbo therefore grew slightly faster than the Dutch supermarket sector as a whole. The turnover of restaurant formula La Place has more than doubled to 107 million euros. This means that the income of the subsidiary is almost back to pre-coronavirus levels.
Read also: How did Jumbo CEO Frits van Eerd end up in the world of shady car dealer Theo Eggens?
Price increases
Passing that symbolic turnover limit is “special”, says Ton van Veen, who temporarily manages Jumbo as delegated supervisory director, in a written explanation. At the same time, the figure also reflects the price increases that consumers have had to deal with in the past year. According to Van Veen, these are “worrying”, because a growing group is having trouble making ends meet as a result.
Jumbo is therefore doing “everything it can to contain price increases and to keep shopping accessible to everyone,” says Van Veen. According to him, all parties in the ‘food chain’ have a responsibility to keep groceries affordable. “For that reason, we ourselves are also satisfied with a lower margin on essential items.”
The company does not report how high Jumbo’s profit was last year. The group usually only communicates these figures when the annual report is published, sometime in the coming months.