If you're accused of buying out tell the pubco to sue you and deal with the consequences of their alleged loss in court.

The massive stupidity of this considerably large part of the industry - where companies supposedly concerned with monitoring stock are draining off several £million of their owne profits and operating costs from publicans' annual turnover - is that:

1) Flow monitoring equipment does not distinguish between beer and water (not quite what Mr Thorley told the BEC inquiry).

2) Relies on people sitting in a remote office to GUESS how much of each pub's weekly volume is water and detergent used in line cleaning rather than beer.

3) Note that the companies involved NEVER highlight large variances in a pub's volume which clearly show the pub has been consistently selling LESS beer than it has bought from the propco, errr sorry, pubco. They will not point out to a tenant this sort of clear evidence that the equipment throws out wildly inaccurate data which simply should never be relied on for stock taking let alone as cellar KGB. It doesn't have a chocolate teapot in a sauna's chance of getting through a court case

3) Even if this equipment WERE Weights and Measures compliant - WHICH IT IS NOT - it cannot feasibly be calibrated accurately enough to produce reliably accurate reports on a site by site basis across thousands of pubs simply because there would have to be a national team of hundreds, if not thousands, of trained qualified technicians working constantly across the national estate to recalibrate and monitor for accuracy every week.