The founder of the Spanish Wine Academy wanted by Interpol

The headline only refers to one of the aspect of this strange story. Pancho Campo founded some years back the Spanish Wine Academy, a training and event organising profit motivated corporation (and not as one might guess from the name an official Spanish body). Campo is also the organiser of the wine hullabaloo Wine Futures that is taking place in Rioja at this very moment (November 13) with speakers such as Robert Parker, Jancis Robinson and Gary Vaynerchuk. It turns out that Campo has been sentenced to one year in prison in absentia in Dubai and that there is an international arrest warrant on him. When the news of this broke Campo decided to relinquish the management of the Wine Futures congress and hand over the responsibility to someone else (his brother in law if we remember right). Jim Budd, an investigative English wine journalist (if ever there were such a thing), has delved into this affair and found that e.g. Campo has been accused by his business partner in Dubai to have “misappropriated” 640,000€, that he was forced to surrender his passport to a Dubai court (so as not to disappear), but left the country using another passport (since he has double nationality). Budd also poses the question (to himself and to Campo) where the funding for the Spanish Wine Academy came from. It is not very difficult to read between the lines and get the impression that it may have been from the Dubai affair. Budd has so far not had an answer from Campo. You can read more about this wine thriller of international dimensions (e.g. Campos MW credentials) on Jim Budd’s blog: Jim’s Loire.