USA: Move underway to require sale of MillerCoors’ shuttered North Carolina brewery

A move is underway to require the sale of a shuttered MillerCoors brewery in Rockingham County as part of a merger between Anheuser-Busch InBev and SABMiller, the Triad Business Journal reported on March 9.

The hope is that move would result in the reopening — and the hiring of hundreds of workers — at the former brewery in Eden.

North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein and state Senate leader Phil Berger, an Eden resident, have written U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions asking him to require surviving entity Anheuser-Busch InBev to sell the brewery to a competitor as part of the approval of the merger. Representatives of then-N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper's office expressed similar views in a letter sent last year to the U.S. Department of Justice, arguing that requiring the sale of the brewery would be good for the competitiveness of the beer industry.

The Eden brewery has the capacity to brew more than 8.8 million barrels of beer per year, which proponents of its sale say accounts for about 4 percent of the nation’s annual beer production. The plant was closed last year, resulting in the loss of jobs for its 520 workers.

“We write the (U.S. Department of Justice) to take action that would save hundreds of good-paying jobs North Carolina’s families need,” Stein said in a news release. “It would help consumers by making the beer brewing market more competitive. The Eden brewery is efficient, profitable and award-winning. It and its hundreds of employees in North Carolina should be put back to work.”

Berger said much the same.

“More than 500 people have lost their jobs and livelihoods in Rockingham County and there is absolutely no reason why multinational conglomerates should force Eden’s state-of-the-art brewing facility to sit empty and rot away simply because they don’t want competition,” Berger said. “We hope our U.S. Justice Department will require mandatory divestiture of this brewery like it did during a smaller merger of beer companies three years ago and keep American jobs in America.”

The federal court reviewing this merger has not yet taken action on the case. Anheuser-Busch InBev entered into an agreement to purchase South-African company SABMiller for $107 billion in 2015.

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