The prosecutor has pointed out, Tuesday, June 21, before the criminal court, a “fraud” which led to a “public health problem and health security”.
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“A fraudulent sector of the meadow until the plate”: at the trial of eighteen horse meat professionals, including five Belgians and Dutch, prosecutor Guillaume Bricier denounced, Tuesday, June 21, “a case of magnitude which illustrates a completely faulty chain at all stages “. Even if the facts judged by the Marseille Criminal Court concern “documentary fraud” – false massifs on animal identification books and on drug treatment sheets – “we are also on a public health problem and health security, “noted the magistrate.
For having “made consumers take big risks by blurring any traceability, Mr. Bricier required sentences that were brought to six months suspended prison up to five years in prison, including two years suspended and suspended A fine of 100,000 euros, against the Belgian Jean-Marc Decker. The latter, one of the very first European governing horse traders until 2015, is, in the eyes of the accusation, “the central element” of an organized gang scam and a deception that caused A danger to human health. Son and grandson of horse merchants, installed in Bastogne (Belgium), Jean-Marc Decker delivered thirty to forty horses every week at the slaughterhouse in Alès, in the Gard. Half a thousand of animals was shot there with a falsified identification book.
Debates have uncovered the total absence of professionalism of the horse butchere sector, unlike that of cattle. The main holders of horses, whether for work, sport and leisure, are indeed individuals and not professionals. The errors in the application of a European regulation governing, in 2008, the identification of animals and their health monitoring, constituted the spine of the defense of defendants. “Each country applied it in a different way. We only had scraps of information, we thought it was like that and it was not like that. I did nothing in bad faith”, S ‘ is defended Jean-Marc Decker.
“undocumented” animals
The prosecutor concedes that “the flaws of administration and control have been knowingly exploited to reach the slaughter of horses unfit for human consumption and this in order to maximize profits”, but the argument is not For him that “a smoke screen”. On telephone interceptions, he insists, the defendants speak only of “good” and “bad” horses according to the regularity of their papers, new European rules and means of bypassing them.
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