The director of a meat processing and wholesale company who is accused of mixing horse meat with beef was arrested by Dutch authorities on Thursday. The man was arrested on suspicion of fraud and if convicted could face a maximum of six years in prison, according to the Associated Press.
Dutch privacy laws prevented prosecutors from disclosing the name of the arrested man or of the company he directs but Dutch media identified the man as Willy Selten. Selten's company, Selten's Meat Works, is in the middle of an enormous recall of beef that may have been mixed with horsemeat, according to the AP.
The company involved in the scandal allegedly bought 300 tons of horsemeat from the Netherlands, Britain and Ireland, repackaged the meat as beef and then resold it, according to a statement from prosecutors.
Wily Selten admitted that his company had mixed horsemeat with beef on Dutch TV Wednesday but claims that it did so at the request of a client and that the company had never mislabeled beef that had been mixed with horsemeat, reports Reuters.
Reuters reports that Selten is one of two Dutch companies under fire for trading 50,000 tons of beef that had to be recalled in April. After conducting an investigation last week the Dutch Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority said that the tainted meat had ended up at 1,722 different restaurants, hotels and caterers. The meat was also distributed to 39 butchers, 184 supermarkets and 290 traders and processing plants, according to Reuters.
The horsemeat scandal began when an Irish food safety watchdog group detected horse DNA in burgers that were sold by large British and Irish supermarkets in January. After pulling 10 million burgers from shelves authorities tried to track down where exactly the horsemeat came from, eventually leading to Selten's company, the Associated Press reports.
