Horsemeat: Finger-pointing grows
2013-02-11 21:40
Bucharest - Two Romanian plants believed to be the source
of horsemeat mislabelled as beef in supermarkets across Europe declared it
properly and any fraud was committed somewhere else down the line, officials
said on Monday.
Romania is scrambling to contain the damage from the fast-growing
horsemeat scandal - where the cheaper meat was substituted for beef in
everything from burgers to frozen lasagne.
The finger-pointing is growing by the day, involving more
countries and more companies.
France says that Romanian butchers and Dutch and Cypriot
traders were part of a supply chain that resulted in horsemeat being labelled
as beef before it was included in frozen dinners including lasagne, moussaka
and the French equivalent of Shepherd's Pie.
The affair started earlier this year with worries about
horsemeat in burgers in Ireland and Britain.
Horsemeat is largely taboo in Britain and some other
countries, though in France it is sold in specialty butcher shops and is prized
by some connoisseurs.
Authorities aren't worried about health effects, but it
has unsettled consumers across Europe and raised questions about producers
misleading the public.
A maze of trading between meat wholesalers has made it
increasingly difficult to trace the origins of food.
France's agricultural minister said on Monday that
regulators must find a way "out of the fog”.
One of the slaughterhouses implicated, Carmolimp, said in
a statement its meat was properly labelled as horsemeat, adding that it had not
exported beef in 2012.
It called attempts to blame it for the scandal
"shameful”, suggesting that only an incompetent French meat processor
would mistake the horsemeat for beef.
Romania has some 25 horsemeat slaughterhouses and exports
horsemeat to Cyprus, France, Poland and the Netherlands, often through
middlemen, officials said.
In deeply rural Romania, horses are sold from individual
households to abattoirs, and each animal has four sets of documents before its
meat is exported.
Romanian authorities stopped short of confirming that the
two slaughterhouses were the source of the horsemeat.
But they said they checked paperwork that shows they were
not improperly mislabelling meat before it was shipped out of the country to
middlemen.
Prime Minister Victor Ponta said on Monday there were no
direct contracts between the Romanian plants and French companies and that the
meat would have been mislabelled somewhere else along the line.
"We can now ask that the guilty parties are
sanctioned as fast and firmly as possible," he said. "I want to help
catch and punish the guilty ones... We are victims of this fraud."
Horsemeat fraud
An initial investigation by French safety authorities
determined that French company Poujol bought frozen meat from a Cypriot trader.
That trader had received it from a Dutch food trader, and
that Dutch company had received the meat from two Romanian slaughterhouses.
Swedish officials were meeting on Monday with executives
from the biggest supermarket chains to get an overview of how widespread the
fraud is, while in Paris top French government officials and meat producers
were gathering to get a handle on the crisis, which has snared a French food
processing company, Comigel.
The Dutch Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority also
said Monday it was launching an investigation into the horsemeat scandal.
Re-tracing the path of the mislabelled meat will take
time. Processed foods, unlike fresh, do not need to be labelled by their
countries of origin in Europe.
And typical frozen meals like the ones being pulled from
supermarket shelves across Europe can have more than a dozen ingredients from
all over.
French Agriculture Minister Stephane Le Foll said the
results of the French investigation into the horsemeat fraud would be released on Wednesday.
Health risks
No one has reported health risks from the mislabelled meat.
But clearly some company in the food chain benefited from selling the much
cheaper horsemeat as beef.
"There are people who are out there to defraud, who
are looking to cheat," Le Foll told RTL radio.
Sorin Minea, who heads Romania's main food producers'
association, claimed on Monday in an interview that international gangs had
perpetrated the fraud.
"There is an international ring that does this...
the documents [relating to the meat] are changed abroad," he said.
An expert would know the difference between horsemeat and
beef and would be unlikely to mislabel it by accident.
"If the buyer is suspicious they have to check it at
the source," he said.
Michel Barnier, a former French agricultural minister who
now works at the EU level, said it was not an issue of food safety but of
justice.
"Consumers have the right to the truth, quality, and
transparence. We have to do more in tracking," he told Europe 1 radio.
Findus Sweden plans to sue France's Comigel for breach of
contract and fraud, Findus Nordic CEO Jari Latvanen said.
He said the company's deal with Comigel stipulates that
the beef in the frozen lasagne should come from Germany, France or Austria, but
that has not been the case.
- AP
