Horse meat scandal arrest: Dutch police arrest meat wholesaler in horse meat probe

Horse meat arrest: Investigators from the Dutch Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority arrested the man on suspicion of fraud and detained him for further questioning. If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of six year's imprisonment, according to prosecutors.

|
Petr David Josek/AP/File
Food samples are tested for any possible traces of horse meat at a veterinary laboratory in Prague, Czech Republic, in this Feb. file photo.

Dutch authorities on Thursday arrested the director of a meat-processing and wholesale company whose business is at the center of an investigation into undeclared mixing of horse meatwith beef.

Investigators from the Dutch Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority arrested the man on suspicion of fraud and detained him for further questioning. If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of six year's imprisonment, according to prosecutors.

His identity was not released, in line with Dutch privacy laws, but local media identified him as Willy Selten, whose company is at the heart of a huge recall of beef that had possibly been mixed with horse meat. An interim director of the company was arrested on Tuesday and an administrative employee also is suspected of fraud, but has not been detained, prosecutors said.

The company involved also was not identified, but is based in the province of North Brabant, which is home to Selten's meat works.

The company allegedly bought 300 tons of horse meat from the Netherlands, Britain and Ireland from 2011-2012 and sold it on as beef, prosecutors said in a statement.

Investigators who pored over the company's books were unable to establish where exactly all the meat came from or where it went.

Selten has, in the past, denied having sold horse meat as beef. He was in police custody Thursday and unavailable for comment.

His business has collapsed since it was linked to the horse-meat scandal, which broke in mid-January, when Ireland's food safety watchdog announced that it had discovered traces of horse DNA in burger products sold by major British and Irish supermarkets. The mislabeled products came from Irish processor Silvercrest Foods, which withdrew 10 million burgers from store shelves.

Irish officials first blamed an imported powdered beef-protein additive used to pad out cheap burgers, then frozen blocks of slaughterhouse leftovers imported from Poland — as a complex web of meat transactions across Europe was revealed to an alarmed European public.

Subsequently, traces of horse meat turned up across Europe in frozen supermarket meals such as burgers and lasagna, as well as in in fresh beef pasta sauce, on restaurant menus, in school lunches and in hospital meals.

Millions of products were pulled from store shelves in Britain, Ireland, France, Spain, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and supermarkets and food suppliers were told to test processed beef products for horseDNA.

Last month, the Dutch food safety authority called on 370 companies around Europe and 132 more in the Netherlands to recall 50,000 tons of meat they bought from Willy Selten. A week later, his business was declared bankrupt.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Horse meat scandal arrest: Dutch police arrest meat wholesaler in horse meat probe
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Latest-News-Wires/2013/0523/Horse-meat-scandal-arrest-Dutch-police-arrest-meat-wholesaler-in-horse-meat-probe
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe