French Spanghero accused of being responsible for horsemeat fraud

The company responsible for mislabeling horsemeat as beef has been revealed to be French meat- processing company Spanghero, according to an investigation carried out by French authorities.

French junior minister for consumer affairs Benoit Hamon said Spanghero will be charged with fraud as it was well aware of the mislabeling, according to French newspaper Le Parisien, cited by Mediafax. Spanghero received at least 750 tons of meat coded as horsemeat from Romania that left its facility labeled as European Union beef, said Hamon. The meat was later delivered to Comigel, which used it to produce prepared ready meals later found to contain horse.

Spanghero had initially blamed two Romanian meat companies, Carmolimp and Doly Com, for the fraud.

The horsemeat scandal started about two weeks ago in Great Britain after horsemeat was found in ready meals labeled as containing only beef. The scandal soon spread outside Great Britain to as many as 16 EU member states, triggering both national and EU investigations and an inflamed debate on food safety and traceability.

The horsemeat contamination was not an error, but part of a criminal conspiracy in which suppliers passed off horsemeat as beef in order to benefit from the price difference, said the French agriculture minister.

The fraud, however, was not committed in Romania, said local authorities and industry representatives.

No violation of rules or standards had been found at the two Romanian abattoirs alleged by the French authorities to have supplied horsemeat labeled as beef, said the Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta at the beginning of this week, adding that the country was not willing to accept the role of the “usual suspect”.

Romania’s agriculture minister Daniel Constantin said this Wednesday, at the end of an emergency meeting in Belgium with authorities from France, Romania, Holland, Luxembourg and Britain, that data from the EU’s Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) confirmed that horsemeat leaving Romania had not been mislabeled.

He added that Romania was eagerly awaiting the final conclusion of the inquiry conducted by the European Commission, as the local meat industry was already starting to suffer from the fallout. “I have talked with several exporters and they told me that they are already being dropped by clients on the European market, which will lead to lower prices and, implicitly, losses,” said Constantin, according to Agerpres neswire.