Businessmen who mixed horse meat with beef jailed for 10 years

Greedy fraudsters who tried to pass off 30 tonnes of cheap horsemeat as beef have been jailed for nearly 10 years.

Ulrik Nielson and Andronicos Sideras secretly mixed the cuts with beef and sold on 83,000kg to big companies to use in ready meals and pies across Britain and Europe.Their horsebeef scam was only discovered when a surprise inspection in 2013 found horse ID chips in batches labelled “100 per cent beef”.


Nielson, Sideras and a third man, Alex Beech, were sentenced together at Inner London Crown Court yesterday .

Nielson, who wore a checked blue shirt was jailed for three years and six months and banned from being a company director for ten years.

Flexifoods would buy beef for about three euros per kilogram and horsemeat for two euros per kilogram.

The meat would then be sent to Sideras’s cold-store, Dino’s and Son, in Tottenham, north London, where it would be secretly mixed.

Fake labelling to trick buyers into thinking it was beef was also produced at Sideras’s property while Flexifood found unsuspecting buyers for the dodgy mixes.

They were caught out when Sideras sent a batch of mixed meat to the wrong buyer, which then rejected the delivery before it was sent to a cold store in Northern Ireland.

A surprise inspection of the cold store revealed horse DNA in the batch of meat, along with the horse identification chips.

The UK Sun