A businessman has denied trying to pass horsemeat off as beef as he began giving evidence at his trial for conspiracy to defraud.
Andronicos Sideras admitted holding and relabelling consignments of horsemeat for a business contact but told the jury that storing it was perfectly legal. He added that his firm only changed the labels because pallets of the meat had been damaged in transit and had to be repacked.
Denying any involvement in mixing the two meats together at his north London business, Dinos & Sons, the 55-year-old told inner London crown court on Wednesday: “We have never purchased, used or sold horsemeat.”
The prosecution accuses him of taking consignments of horsemeat and beef, mixing them together into a single load and creating false paperwork and labels to “make it look like all the meat being supplied was beef”.
Sideras said that, when the shipments of horsemeat arrived at his premises, some of the shrink-wrapped pallets needed to be restacked and wrapped. In the process, he said, it was impossible to know that the same slabs of meat went on to the same pallets, meaning they also needed to be weighed again and relabelled with the correct weights.
His lawyer, Michael Levy, asked if this was a “dishonest thing as part of a conspiracy to deceive or disguise”.
“I do not accept that,” Sideras replied. “We restacked the pallets and, in order for the correct weight to go on so we wouldn’t have any problems, we weighed the products and put the correct weights on. As far as I was concerned, that was the proper thing to do.
“The product didn’t belong to me, it belonged to someone else, and I wanted it to go on as such.”
Sideras said he often held shipments in his storage facility for business contacts.
Asked if he had reservations about holding the horsemeat for his suppliers, Ulrik Nielsen and Alex Beech of the Danish-based firm Flexi Foods, he said: “No, because at the time, the boxes that have come in were labelled and stamped and it was just another meat.”
The trial continues.
