Agents from the Nature Protection Service (Seprona) of the Civil Guard have arrested four people in Motril (Granada) for distributing conventional fruits and vegetables in European markets as if they were organic products. The alleged food fraud was perfectly organised for buyers, as the goods had all the certificates and even the necessary analyses to appear to be what they were not. Investigators estimate that, in the last six months alone, up to two million kilos of these supposedly organic fruits and vegetables have been sold. Investigators have not yet determined when the fraud began and are limiting themselves to calculations only for this period.
The operation, which is still ongoing, has so far left four people arrested and 16 people under investigation, who are accused of aggravated fraud, document falsification, certificate falsification, use of false certificates against the Treasury and Social Security, as well as belonging to a criminal group. This last classification is due to the fact that a criminal group is classified as a meeting of two or more people to commit crimes, regardless of whether they are in the fruit and vegetable sector or any other.
The origin of the operation lies in a series of requests that Europol routinely makes to Seprona. Periodically, the European police ask the Spanish Civil Guard to investigate, depending on the moment, different areas of its competence. “Sometimes it is wood, other times vegetables, and in this case, they asked us to look at organic fruit and vegetable products,” say sources from the Civil Guard. They add that it is “a small area in size compared to conventional crops, but with much more difficulty in terms of documentation and justification.”
The agents then began an investigation that led them to discover “things that were jarring”, say sources close to the police work. They required the help of personnel from both the Department of Agriculture of the Andalusian Government and the state Tax Agency “to make sense of the plot”, they say. Thus, in an operation that lasted six months, they were able to unravel the route of the fruit and vegetables from the fields to the European counters. Among those investigated are the operators who supplied this conventional fruit and vegetables.
The Motril-based distribution company, whose owner and front man have been arrested, bought the products from conventional farming companies that were already selling them with false organic certificates. These documents are required to put products with this qualification into circulation. In any case, when investigating it became clear that these certificates were incompatible with the farms of origin of the vegetables, since all farms that grow organic products must be registered as such and have the appropriate documentation and certification, which is granted by authorized private agencies. The heads of these private companies that signed the false organic certificates are among those under investigation, the Civil Guard has confirmed.
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Finally, the icing on the cake of this food fraud was provided by certain approved laboratories that cooperated by carrying out analyses on the vegetables with surprising results: they were always negative for traces of phytosanitary products, which confirmed the organic nature of the products. The financial value of the operation is still to be determined.
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