Quebec Company Named in Pig-Drug Scandal May Be Victim of Fraud
Quebec Company Named in Pig-Drug Scandal May Be Victim of Fraud
(Bloomberg) -- Frigo Royal was named as the company that sent contaminated Canadian pork to China earlier this month. But as the case escalated this week, authorities are wondering if the Quebec-based processor is a victim.
Canada was first notified by China on June 14 that a pork shipment contained traces of ractopamine, a feed additive banned in the Asian nation. At the time, the Canadian Pork Council said the meat came from Frigo Royal. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency later discovered the export certificate was phony, leading to a blanket ban on all Canadian meat by China and questions about the pork’s origin.
Marie-Claude Bibeau, Canadian agriculture and agri-food minister, wouldn’t speculate on where the pork came from but said that given a fake certificate was involved, it’s possible it wasn’t from Frigo Royal.
“I don’t know why their name has been used but it doesn’t mean they are into it at all,” Bibeau said by telephone. “Everything that is written on the certificate, we just cannot say that it is true.”
A company representative declined to comment when contacted by telephone. Authorities continue to investigate.
On the food agency’s website, Frigo Royal is listed as a licensed facility able to export meat and process poultry and red meat. It is also listed as operating as Expedi-Go Transit, which bought it last year.
In a February 2018 release, the new company expressed optimism about becoming a provider of choice in Quebec in the storage and transportation of frozen products. It also vowed to invest more than C$1 million ($764,000) to modernize storage and improve client services, which include “major players of the Quebec food industry.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Ashley Robinson in Winnipeg (Non BLP Loc) at arobinson193@bloomberg.net;Sandrine Rastello in Montreal at srastello@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: James Attwood at jattwood3@bloomberg.net, Pratish Narayanan
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