Seventy-three-year-old Yutaka Oike, chairman of the National Federation of Agricultural Cooperative Associations (Zen-Noh Chicken Foods Co), is to resign in response to the scandal surrounding the recent revelation of the firm’s labelling scam.

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“I profoundly apologize for betraying the trust of consumers and producers. I will resign before my term expires,” Oike told reporters at a news conference late last night [Wednesday].


Zen-Noh was caught labelling seven tons of imported Thai and Chinese chicken as premium domestic produce from the Kagoshima Prefecture in a bid to cash in on the higher prices commanded by poultry in the wake of the outbreak of BSE in Japan.


Japanese farm ministry investigators raided the company’s offices in Toda, Saitama Prefecture, earlier this week to investigate the scam.


The company also revealed yesterday that it sold broiler chicken meat as special chicken meat raised with no chemical feed. Preliminary investigations by company officials have found that as much as 233 tons of broiler chicken meat had been wrongly labelled between April 2001and this month.

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