A Dublin micro-brewery has filed a complaint with the European Commission alleging that the Revenue Commissioners have failed to comply with EU competition law.

The two-year-old Dublin Brewing Company, which employs eight people at Smithfield but does not have bottling facilities, has stated that extra regulations on the charging of excise duty on beer produce is anti-competitive and potentially amounts to about £360,000 annually in lost orders for the bottled product.

Mr Kieran Finnerty, the managing director of the Dublin Brewing Company, based in Smithfield, said yesterday that the regulations prevented him from transporting beer back from a contract bottlers to his warehouse for distribution, and the process was being held up while being reviewed.

He currently has an order for 40,000 bottles of beer from the CoOp stores in Britain. "If we do not ship this beer, we are going to start losing clients," he said.

In his official complaint he says that the commissioners' failure to comply with Council Directive 92/ 12EEC means that duty can be charged on beer movements within the State even though it is between bonded warehouses, which provide for excisable products.

"The excise rules which we must operate under are not available in print and in practice appear to encourage a situation where one supplier has 80 per cent of the beer market. Damages are estimated at £30,000 a month," Mr Finnerty states in his complaint to the European Commission. He has also lobbied Government ministers and complained to the Ombudsman on the issue, saying that wine and spirits can be moved with duty suspension between tax (bonded) warehouses, but not beer. "It may suit the Excise Dept to have one company writing 80 per cent of the cheques for revenue collection, but it does nothing for small business in this sector," he says. A spokeswoman for the Revenue Commissioners said that they could not comment on individual cases but said that beer was an excisable product similarly to wine and spirits.