French firm blamed in horse meat fiasco
BY LORI HINNANT & JILL LAWLESS Associated Press
Friday, February 15, 2013
PARIS — The price, smell and
color should have been clear
tipoffs something was wrong with
shipments of horse meat that
were fraudulently labeled as beef,
French authorities said Thursday.
The government pinned the bulk
of the blame on a French wholesaler
at the heart of a growing scandal
in Europe.
Police in the U.K., meanwhile,
announced the arrests Thursday of
three men on suspicion of fraud at
two meat plants inspected earlier
this week by the country’s Food
Standards Agency.
The two separate developments
were part of an escalating scare
that has raised questions about
food controls in the European
Union — and highlighted how little
consumers know about the complex
trading operations that get
food from producers to wholesalers
to processors to stores and onto
their dinner table.
Europol, the European Union
police agency, is coordinating a
broad continent-wide fraud investigation
amid allegations of an international
criminal conspiracy to
substitute horse for more expensive
beef.
In Paris, Benoit Hamon, the
government’s consumer affairs
minister, said it appeared that in
the most prominent case fraudulent
meat sales had been going on
for several months, and reached
across 13 countries and 28 companies.
He did not name the countries
or companies.
He said there was plenty of
blame to go around, but most of it
rested with Spanghero, a wholesaler
based in southern France.
Officials at Spanghero denied
knowingly buying and reselling
horse meat but French authorities
immediately suspended their trading
activities.
Hamon said Spanghero was one
company in a chain that started
with two Romanian slaughterhouses
that says they clearly labeled
their meat as horse.
The meat was then bought by a
Cyprus-registered trader and sent
to a warehouse in the Netherlands.
Spanghero bought the meat
from the trader, then resold it to
the French frozen food processor
Comigel. The resulting food was
marketed under the Sweden-based
Findus brand as lasagna and other
products as containing ground
beef.
Hamon said Spanghero was well
aware that the meat was mislabeled
when it sold it to Comigel.
“Spanghero knew,” Hamon said.
“One thing that should have attracted
Spanghero’s attention? The
price."
Hamon said the meat from Romania
cost far below the market
rate for beef.
A representative for Spanghero
said company officials have been
interrogated by authorities, who
have raided Spanghero headquarters
several times in recent days,
but no one has been arrested.
The representative insisted the
company acted “in good faith”
and that it never knew the meat it
bought and sold was horse meat.
The representative said he was not
authorized to be publicly named
according to his contract with
Spanghero.
He wouldn’t comment on
French authorities’ insistence that
Spanghero should have recognized
the meat as horse by its price, smell
and color.
Food processor Comigel was not
blameless either, Hamon said, declaring
that the paperwork from
Spanghero had significant irregularities,
including a failure to specify
country of origin.
“And once the meat was defrosted,
we can ask ourselves why
Comigel didn’t notice that the color
and odor was not that of beef?”
Hamon said.
Associated Images:
A sign marks the entrance of meat supplier Spanghero’s facility in Castelnaudary,
France. French Economy Minister Benoit Hamon on Thursday pinned
the bulk of the blame on the wholesaler, saying it is at the heart of the growing
horse meat scandal in Europe. MANUEL BLONDEAU/Associated Press
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