InBrief
Warrants issued for spirits cheats
Warrants for the arrest of two restaurant owners were issued after they failed to turn up to court on charges of spirits substitution. In February 2007, Trading Standards officers discovered inferior vodka being sold from a Smirnoff bottle in King Balti Restaurant on Corporation Road, Newport. One of the owners, Shahiduar Rahman, was arrested and taken to court on the same day.
JDW plans £1.2m venue in Hatfield
JD Wetherspoon (JDW) has confirmed it has bought premises at the newly-constructed Comet Square site off Comet Way in Hatfield, Hertfordshire.
It is hoped a bar will be up and running by the end of the year. As yet the chain
has not released details
of the size or design of the pub. The project will cost around £1.2m.
Hosts win cricket trip to New Zealand
Two licensees at a Marston's managed pub have won a cricket trip of a lifetime to New Zealand. Ashley and Carole Cooper of the Attleborough Arms in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, won the trip in a competition from Marston's in-house magazine The Word. Marston's is official beer of the England cricket team. Ashley said: "We're thrilled. I don't usually enter competitions. Carole hasn't come off the ceiling yet."
Sympathy for the Prime Minister?
Gordon Brown has been banned from another Yorkshire pub. Licensee Sue Grundy, of the Bridge, at Elland, blames the Prime Minister - who has already been barred from the Commercial Inn and the Royal Shepherd Inn, both in Skipton - for the smoking ban and resulting fall of trade in her pub. She said: "We don't have trouble makers in our pubs and he's the biggest trouble maker of all because he's made a lot of people very unhappy with this ridiculous anti-freedom law."
Marston's on awards short list
Marston's has been short-listed in the Hollis Sponsorship Awards 2008 in the Sport Sponsorship category for its backing of the England Cricket Board as the Official Beer of English Cricket. The Sports Sponsorship Awards takes into account the rationale behind the sponsorship and the planning, execution and evaluation of the activity to promote and leverage the sponsorship.
