French meat food industrial factory, working on the production chain of beef steaks. A Europe-wide food fraud scandal over horsemeat sold as beef deepened as Romania announced an inquiry into the origin of the meat and suspicions of criminal activity mounted.
Horse-drawn carts were a common form of transport for centuries in Romania, but hundreds of thousands of the animals are feared to have been sent to the abattoir after the change in road rules.
The law, which was passed six years ago but only enforced recently, also banned carts drawn by donkeys, leading to speculation among food-industry officials in France that some of the "horse meat" which has turned up on supermarket shelves in Britain, France and Sweden may, in fact, turn out to be donkey meat. "Horses have been banned from Romanian roads and millions of animals have been sent to the slaughterhouse," said Jose Bove, a veteran campaigner for small farmers who is now vice-president of the European Parliament agriculture committee.
After a couple of days in which the horse meat affair was seen as a largely British problem, the scandal began to be taken seriously by French politicians and newspapers over the weekend.
The French consumer minister, Benoît Hamon, said today that he would not hesitate to take legal action if evidence emerged that the two French companies which handled the meat had been aware of the fraud.
In passing, Mr Hamon also took a swipe at the British Government. He said that London was complaining about weak European food inspection while cutting the budget for EU food-safety checks in Brussels.
His warning came as France's biggest supermarket chains removed more of their own-label and Findus processed dishes from their shelves.
Mr Hamon said that preliminary investigation by the French agency that combats consumer fraud had uncovered the Byzantine route taken by the "fake" beef.
It came from abattoirs in Romania through a dealer in Cyprus working through another dealer in Holland to a meat plant in the south of France which sold it to a French-owned factory in Luxembourg which made it into frozen meals sold in supermarkets in 16 countries.
on this in longing for even horse/donkey meat?