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HYDERABAD, Nov. 24

COCA-COLA Company has been accused of making a "deliberate attempt to destroy our business and wipe us out from the market" by Mr S. K. Jaipuria , Chairman of Charminar Bottling Company Pvt Ltd (CBCL), the Indian franchisee bottler of Pepsi.

Stating that CBCL has got back the first lot of its empty glass bottles that were seized during the police raids on Coca-Cola premises here, Mr Jaipuria said, "we stand vindicated that our legal property was picked up from the market by the Coca-Cola Company with an ulterior motive to cripple our business in the city".

In the past week, Pepsi and Coca-Cola in Andhra Pradesh were embroiled in charges and counter-charges of hoarding of bottles. The police had, on complaints from Pepsi, raided three bottling plants of Coke in and around Hyderabad and seized about 53 lakh of empty bottles allegedly hoarded by the business rival. In turn, Coca-Cola on Wednesday filed a complaint with the police alleging that Pepsi, in connivance with CBCL, had destroyed millions of its returnable bottles.

Mr Jaipuria told newspersons that the number of Pepsi bottles "lifted" by Coca-Cola accounted for 30 per cent of the entire glass float of CBCL. Consequently, the company had incurred a loss of about Rs 20 crore.

In the process of collecting empty bottles from the market, Mr Jaipuria said, some bottles of competing brands inadvertently get picked up.

However, the number of such bottles at any given point of time could at best be in the range of few thousand cases, which were exchanged with the other company in the normal course. For instance, in the past two years, Pepsi and Coca-Cola here have exchanged 15,000 bottles.

However, he said, in this case, the bottles found in the warehouses of Coca-Cola here were in excess of 50 lakh. " Surely, this large quantity of bottles was not picked up with any intention of exchange at a later date, which is evident from the fact that in the Ameenpura and Maula Ali plants, huge quantity of such bottles was kept in gunny bags in dilapidated condition".

On the other hand, Coca-Cola, in a press release on Wednesday, accused Pepsi of "levelling false charge" against Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages of holding Pepsi bottles.

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