Two former executives of dissolved meat processor Snow Brand Foods (SBF) have entered a “not guilty” plea on charges that they conspired to defraud a government meat industry organisation of around ¥195m (US$166m).
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SBF is alleged to have falsely labelled imported meat as domestic product in order to benefit from the beef subsidies handed out by the Japanese government in a bid to buoy up a sector suffered after the outbreak of BSE last September.
In the first hearing of the trial of former SBF senior managing director Hiromi Sakurada and managing director Masami Inoue, however, the pair insisted that they did not conspire to gain the subsidies fraudulently.
“I never attempted to swindle the organization out of money, nor did I conspire with anybody else to do so,” Sakurada told Kobe District Court.
According to reports in the Daily Yomiuri, however, Sakurada agreed to mislabelling the beef when Shigeru Hatakeyama, head of SBF’s meat sales and procurement department, told him on 30 October that it was a necessary move in order to keep pace with other meat processing firms.
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By GlobalData
