020640 Japanese Company Targeted in Meat Mislabeling

Tokyo - The Japanese food industry was stung by another quality-control scandal Friday when the government accused a company of mislabeling imported beef to cash in on a mad-cow beef-buyback program.

Meat processing firm Nippon Shokuhin Co. tried to pass off 122 tons of foreign beef tendons — worth about 136 million yen (dlrs 1.14 million) — under the scam, according to Agriculture Ministry official Toshiro Kawashima.

Nippon Shokuhin was allegedly trying to take advantage of a lucrative government program to purchase local meat potentially contaminated with mad cow disease in order to get the tainted food off the market.

The case follows a similar incident that toppled Snow Brand Foods Co., formerly Japan's No. 6 meatpacker. That company admitted in January that it mislabeled foreign beef as domestic and has gone bankrupt in the ensuing scandal.

Kawashima said the Agriculture Ministry was still investigating Nippon Shokuhin and would decide later whether to press charges against the company. Kawashima said the government had caught the scam before actually buying the meat.

The Japanese government has spent billions of yen (millions of U.S. dollars) buying and disposing of local beef potentially contaminated with the bovine brain-wasting illness, which is linked to the fatal human variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

The Snow Brand beef scam sparked public anger and raised questions about corporate ethics and product safety in Japan.

Beef sales in Japan have plunged since authorities here reported the first case of mad cow disease outside of Europe in September.

Separately Friday, prosecutors indicted top executives at another food processing firm that mislabeled foreign chicken as domestic so it could sell the meat for higher prices.

Akio Takeda, head of Zen-Noh Chicken Foods' Tokyo area branch, Kimio Kondo, who was head of the planning and control department, and Koichi Takada, head of sales, all face fraud charges, Kyodo News agency reported.

Japanese farm ministry investigators raided Zen-Noh offices this spring after the company admitted falsely labeling 7 tons of Thai and Chinese chicken as top grade "Kagoshima" brand from southern Japan.

The move was meant to meet a spike in demand for chicken as consumers turn away from beef amid Japan's mad cow scare.

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