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| Sunday, 27 January 2002 |
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| News Business Features Editorial
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Scandal-tainted
Japanese company halts sales of 230 beef products.
TOKYO, Jan 26 (AFP) - A subsidiary of Japan's Snow Brand Milk Products Co. Ltd. said Saturday it was halting sales of 230 beef products, as a criminal investigation began into the company's attempt to cash in on a mad cow disease relief programme. Snow Brand Food Co. Ltd. said it was suspending sales of 75 sausages and other beef products for household consumption with immediate effect as well as 155 commercial-use products from Tuesday. "We cannot tell at the moment how much (financial damage) the company will incur from this," company spokesman Masaki Sato said. Snow Brand Food came under fire Wednesday after the company admitted it had mislabelled imported beef as domestically produced to cash in on a government subsidy programme for those hit by the nation's mad cow disease scare. Since September, three cases of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or mad cow disease have been confirmed in Japan, triggering a massive slump in domestic beef sales. The subsidies are intended to compensate Japanese meat producers for thousands of tons of beef withdrawn from the market as a precaution. Snow Brand Food president Shozo Yoshida told a news conference Wednesday his company packaged 13.8 tonnes of Australian beef into containers that were labelled "Japanese food" last October. Nishinomiya Reizo, the company Snow Brand Food contracted to store the mislabelled meat, has separately said it switched the containers under Snow Brand's direction. Meanwhile, agricultural officials inspected Nishinomiya Reizo warehouses some 450 kilometres (280 miles) west of Tokyo on Saturday to examine more than 620 boxes of Snow Brand Food beef. "We are clarifying what happened ... we are launching procedures for prosecution" as a fraud case, Ikuo Kuroki, chief of the Agricultural Administration Office for the western Kinki region, told reporters. The scandal prompted supermarkets to take Snow Brand Food products off the shelves and schools to shun their products. Snow Brand Milk's image was already badly tarnished after about 13,000 people in and around Japan's second city of Osaka fell ill after drinking bacteria-contaminated milk from its local processing plant in the country's worst-ever food poisoning outbreak in June 2000. |
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