French wholesaler draws heat in horse-meat scandal

— The price, smell and color should have been clear tip-offs that 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 horse-meat blame on a French wholesaler at the heart of a growing scandal in Europe.

Police in the United Kingdom, 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 tables.

Europol, the European Union police agency, is coordinating a broad continent wide fraud investigation amid allegations of an international criminal conspiracy to substitute horse meat 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 the meat 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 say 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 that also contained 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 that the company acted “in good faith” and that it never knew that 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.

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.

Romanian food suppliers rejoiced that the blame for the frozen lasagna scandal has shifted away from Romanian slaughterhouses to companies in France - a country that prides itself on its cuisine and culinary culture, and isn’t usually caught up in food scandals.

Sorin Minea, the chief of Romalimenta, the Romanian food industry association, urged tough sanctions for the French companies. “Romania, small and ugly as it is, respected all European legislation. In the U.K., legislation was not respected,” he said. “I am sad that first we were accused and then there was an inquiry. We feel we are not part of the European family.”

Britain’s food regulator, meanwhile, said Thursday that six horse carcasses that tested positive for an equine painkiller may have entered the human food chain in France and that horse meat tainted with the medicine may have been sold to consumers “for some time.”

The U.K. Food Standards Agency said eight out of 206 horses it checked had tested positive for phenylbutazone, commonly known as bute. The drug is banned for human use in countries that include Britain and the U.S.

In separate developments, police in Wales said two men - ages 64 and 42 - were arrested at Farmbox Meats near Aberystwyth, and a 63-year-old man was arrested at the Peter Boddy Slaughterhouse in Todmorden, West Yorkshire.

Also, Germany said food containing horse meat has also surfaced there, and two German national supermarkets have pulled frozen lasagna from their shelves.

Information for this article was contributed by Cassandra Vinograd,Angela Charlton,Alison Mutler, Mike Corder and David Rising of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 10 on 02/15/2013

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