Feed fraud
Coming in third in our Top 10 list of most popular stories for February 2020 was an article related to criminal activity - a story about arrests in a feed fraud case in the Netherlands.
We reported on how three employees of a feed company based in Noord-Brabant, in the Netherlands, were arrested for selling non-certified food waste as feedstuffs to livestock farmers, as per a statement from the Dutch public prosecution office [OM].
The arrests followed an eight-month long investigation into the operation.
The prosecution office suspected that the company blended and resold substances from mostly unregistered producers - or even waste not suitable for use in feed – to farmers as feed with the GMP + quality label. The company may have generated revenue of €4m through this fraudulent approach from 2017 up until May 2019, said the authorities.