Another blow to the meat: the plot of the rotten hams reappears

New blow to the Spanish meat sector. When the controversy over the criticism launched at the macrogranajas by the Minister of Consumption, Alberto Garzón, is still the business plot dismantled in 2018 has reappeared and that it was dedicated to the sale of Iberian hams and products without a health guarantee, sometimes even rotten.

In recent weeks, the Civil Guard has carried out different operations in which thousands of hams, shoulders and packaged products have been immobilized in different operationswith arrests that, as confirmed by sources close to the investigation, would be linked in some cases to the same people from the old network.

Waiting for how the different ongoing investigations progress now, everything indicates that we may be facing a network of great proportions, with ramifications in different provinces, which, presumably, would have altered health seals, falsifying quality seals and selling products in poor conditionwhich were not even fit for human consumption, which would imply a crime against public health and consumers.

ongoing operations

In the last operation, Guisima, carried out on January 22, there is a total of seven companies involved, distributed between the provinces of Badajoz, Madrid, Murcia and Salamancawith 19,600 confiscated hams that were sold as Iberian when in fact they were not, in addition to another 10,000 more pieces that were immobilized, totaling a value of more than one million euros.

The investigation was initiated by officials of the public health and food service of the Junta de Extremadura who, suspecting that an illegal activity was being carried out, brought the facts to the attention of the Judicial Authority, who ordered the investigation Seprona de Badajoz, in order to determine if they could be incurring in an alleged criminal offense.

In the inspection of the products, which was carried out in a warehouse in the Badajoz town of Zafra, the agents and public health and food officials from Extremadura detected Serious irregularities in traceability, such as alteration of best before datesof various batches of shoulders and cured hams, in addition to sliced ​​and boneless products, which made it impossible to prove their origin and therefore the necessary health guarantee.

According to the sources consulted, “the products they lacked the sanitary registration codes and in many cases the seals of the Iberian quality standard appeared violated or placed irregularly, so that pieces of ham of the commercial quality of cebo (white seal) appeared marked and recognized with seals regulated exclusively for acorn quality”.

But it is that just a few days after this operation, on January 22, agents of the Civil Guard of the Seprona of Cáceres dismantled another similar criminal organization dedicated to an alleged fraudulent activity related to the meat sector in the province.

This time it was the so-called Sekai Operation, for which four people were arrested and five others investigated and proceeded to the seizure of 1,790 hams and shoulders, 760 kilograms of different sausages and 4,500 kilograms of frozen meat from the butchering of the Iberian pig.

A little earlier, on December 30, Seprona agents in Madrid arrested three people in the Costmapa operation and investigated another five for similar crimes, related to public health and consumers, forgery of documents, fraud and crime against property. industry, through introduction to the market of hams and shoulders simulating that they were Iberian.

In that case, the immobilized items were smaller, 405 shoulders and 659 hams worth about 180,000 euros with irregularities in the seals.