Romania’s veterinary agency found a batch of horsemeat labeled as beef at a company in Ilfov county, close to the capital Bucharest, the agency said in a statement.
It said the meat came from a cold storage warehouse in the western Romanian county of Alba and that the whole quantity found at the company in Ilfov was seized.
“During the investigation, the administrator of the warehouse admitted that they were labeling the products with fake labels, using names or data belonging to authorized units,” the agency’s statement said.
Earlier this month, Romania was at the center of a scandal involving horsemeat sold as beef in Europe, with a French company accusing two Romanian slaughterhouses of supplying wrongly-labeled meat.
The Eastern European country initiated an inquiry into the two suppliers named by the French company, which had sold the meat to the UK where it was first discovered it was in fact horsemeat.
The two Romanian abattoirs were cleared of any wrongdoing by the inquiry in Romania after the veterinary authority said that one of them was only supplying horsemeat to the European Union, labeled as such, and the second one had labeled all the products involved in the scandal correctly.
The veterinary agency said there was no link between the current discovery of horsemeat mislabeled as beef and the previous scandal. “The meat was destined for consumption on the national market and not for intra-EU trade and therefore no connection can be made between the isolated case in Ilfov and the situation in other members of the EU,” the agency’s statement said.
According to the veterinary agency’s data, there are 35 abattoirs that are authorized to slaughter horses in Romania and export the meat to the EU.
Last year, the country exported 6,300 tons of horse or donkey meat to the EU, with nearly 97% of the meat going to Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Italy, Greece, Poland, Hungary, Belgium and Germany, the agency said.
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