Jan Fasen
confirmed he bought a consignment of horsemeat from two Romanian abattoirs and
sold it to French companies
 |
French company Spanghero received meat from the Dutch trader seemingly
at the centre of investigations. Photograph: Imago / Barcroft Media |
A Dutch
meat trader has emerged as a key suspect in Europe's spiralling horse meat
scandal following allegations that he was convicted as recently as last year
for passing off horse as beef.
Speaking
exclusively to the Guardian, Jan Fasen, a director of Draap Trading Ltd,
confirmed he bought a consignment of horsemeat from two Romanian abattoirs and
sold it to French food processors. He insisted he had clearly labelled it as
horse.
But on Wednesday
Dutch broadcaster NOS reported that Fasen was sentenced in January 2012 for
deliberately marketing South American horsemeat as halal-slaughtered Dutch beef
and falsifying documents.
Draap
Trading Ltd is a Cypriot-registered company, run from the Antwerp area of
Belgium, and owned by an offshore vehicle based in the British Virgin Islands.
Draap spelled backwards is the Dutch word for horse.
Despite his
denials, the food trader appears to be at the centre of investigations into how
horsemeat entered the European food chain. In January 2012 he received a
one-year jail term, NOS reported. He allegedly falsified papers to deceive
customers. A second Dutch meat trader, from the town of Oosterhoutse, was given
community service, NOS added.
Draap
Trading Ltd delivered meat to the French company Spanghero, which in turn
supplied another French company, Comigel. The Findus lasagne products found in
Britain containing horsemeat came from a Comigel factory in Luxembourg.
Spanghero insisted that the meat delivered to its Castelnaudary plant in
southern France had arrived labelled "Beef - originating in EU". The
company said: "The meat received was beef meat. This was the order that
had been placed. Spanghero did not treat or do anything to the meat."
Frozen meat
products were, meanwhile, withdrawn from supermarket shelves in the
Netherlands, Belgium and France as fears grew that the mislabelling of frozen
foods was much more widespread than Findus lasagne in Britain. "It's very
much a pan-European issue now." said an EU diplomat.
The
Romanians have loudly protested their innocence amid allegations that they
supplied horsemeat as beef. Fasen, who bought the Romanian horsemeat and kept
it at a cold storage company in Breda in the Netherlands before selling it on to
Spanghero, said he would hand over all his information to the Cypriot
authorities, who would then pass it on to the French. Dutch food inspectors
went to the Breda warehouse on Wednesday.
"As
for the Romanian supplies, they delivered 100%," Fasen told the Guardian.
"When they deliver beef, they deliver beef. No problem. When they deliver
horse, they deliver horse. There is never, ever horse invoiced as beef. I was
100% sure I was buying horse. We sold it to Spanghero in France as well as to
clients in Belgium and Holland. It was all sold as horse. There is no
issue."
He added:
"Somebody made a mistake and it was definitely not us."
The two
Romanian slaughterhouses at the centre of the scandal also insisted the
horsemeat sent to Holland was properly labelled. Doly Com and Carmolimp
confirmed they had sold the horsemeat to Draap. Iulian Cazacut, owner of Doly
Com slaughterhouse, said his firm sold over 350 tonnes of horsemeat to the
Cyprus company last year, at a price of €2 a kilo.
Cazacut
said: "We worked for two years with this Cyprus company. They started
buying beef from us a month ago but previously they only bought horse. The
problem is not here, it is somewhere out there. We didn't send minced meat. We
only sent unprocessed meat."
The scandal
has focused attention on the murky pan-European supply chain for meat products,
which stretches from abattoirs to supermarkets via mysterious offshore
companies.
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| Offshore Secrets |
An
investigation by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project revealed
yesterday that that Draap Trading Ltd was registered in 2008 in Limassol,
Cyprus. Its sole shareholder is Hermes Guardian Ltd, an offshore company in the
British Virgin Islands. A Draap representative, Andreas Mercruri, refused to
disclose the beneficial ownership of the company.
Speaking
from Cyprus, he told OCCRP: "I'm sorry but with everything that is going
on at the moment we are not able to comment on anything at this time."
Mercruri answered from the offices of Trident Trust , a Cyprus firm that
provides company formation and incorporation services on the island. Trident
Trust mentions on its website that beneficial ownership information of the
companies it incorporates is not disclosed to any regulatory authority
The same
Hermes Guardian company is a shareholder in at least a dozen other Cyprus,
Panamanian and Russian based companies.
Cyprus
company records indicate a Trident Trust company as a secretary of Draap
Trading while its director is another Cyprus company by the name of Guardstand
Limited. The latter's paperwork points to a link with Russian business.
Authorities
in Romania have suggested that international criminal networks may be involved
in the opaque meat trading business. Sorin Minea, head of Romalimenta, the
Romanian food industry federation, described France's consumer affairs
minister, Benoît Hamon, as an "idiot" after he suggested Romanians
may have been responsible for "a case of fraud".
Minea told
the Guardian: "There is an international mafia ring behind this problem. I
don't know who they may be, or whether any Romanians are involved. But if you
think about it, there were five intermediaries so I'm sure that an
international network is involved."
He also
angrily dismissed the idea that recent European legislation banning horses and
carts from Romania's roads had led to a glut of horsemeat: "What was said,
that Romania has been slaughtering millions of horses, is a complete
aberration. Romania does not have millions of horses at its disposal to
slaughter. If we had done that, perhaps we would be better off financially
now."
Additional
reporting by Roberta Radu and Kim Willsher in Paris
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