“We are in complete confusion. “As the trial of a vast horse meat fraud continues its second week in Marseille, the president of the criminal court, Céline Ballerini, releases these words. They sum up well the backdrop of a scam in which each presumed actor has played a cascading score to have hundreds of horses unfit for human consumption slaughtered in France, but also in Poland, in Space and in Italy. Including Sanofi laboratory horses.
“Can we just put a blank drug treatment sheet without knowing anything about the animal’s medical history, that’s the whole question”, asks the president on Tuesday. Alongside merchants, horse beaters and meat wholesalers, eight veterinarians are indeed tried for complicity in deception and forgery in an administrative act. During the investigation, most admitted having provided their customers with the famous “drug treatment sheets” essential for slaughter, or having attested to the good health of animals intended for export… sometimes without even having them. seen. So many embezzlements which, according to the prosecution, made it possible to blur any traceability of the meat.
Horses without papers
A qualified veterinarian since 1984, Jean-Louis Guillon is used to traveling 50,000 km a year in Aude, where he works. His specialty, as he explained on the stand last week, is large animals. To listen to him, there are not many like him in the department, to exercise this rural activity “which also creates a sector”. He often works with Patrick Rochette, the main defendant for his role considered “preponderant” in the fraud.
At the time of the events, in 2013, he was an identifying veterinarian for the national stud farms. Because since January 1, 2008, all horses must be identified, chipped and registered in a central file, knowing that for old horses born before 2001, identification was not even compulsory. In other words, many old horses simply have no papers, or else incomplete notebooks to which a loose leaf must be added.
“That’s all that was asked for”
“In the equine sector, the State had to face the obligation to identify a large equine population in a sector which does not have this culture”, explained to the examining magistrate Jacques Gérin, in his capacity as representative of the national order of veterinarians. Veterinarians have thus found themselves with a double hat, that of veterinarian but also of “identifier”. Jean-Louis Guillon interprets this role as that of a simple “secretary”: “We just added a blank sheet in notebooks that did not exist, that’s all that was asked”, he argued. at the helm, excluding any notion of control. Also, horses that did not correspond at all to the description used to identify them ended up with passports.
“It is an insertion, I do not certify anything, continued the veterinarian. I happened to notice that the Sanofi horse drug treatment sheets were not filled out, I trust the veterinary services of the slaughterhouse. For him, “the eligibility of the animal for human consumption is made within the slaughterhouse”. A vision that opposes that of the order of veterinarians, for whom “the veterinarian’s signature has value”, and is not just a blank check.
This Tuesday, the criminal court focused more specifically on horse exports led by Jacques Larnaudie to Poland or Italy, from a collection center in Saint-Flour, in Cantal. And this with a view to their slaughter for consumption. Here again, in addition to the fakes established by the horse dealer, a certain vagueness seems to have surrounded the veterinary control of equidae. When Jacques Larnaudie had to send a truck of horses for export, he called a veterinary clinic in Saint-Flour, which dispatched one of the three partners who took charge of these checks.
“No diarrhea, no cough, no abscess”
“As a health veterinarian, we saw all the animals, assures Eric Cluzel, one of them. We went to see the horses presented to us in parks in the covered market. We saw them well. “” No diarrhea, no cough, no abscess, we certified that the horses were transportable, continues the veterinarian. There were 17 notebooks and 17 horses on the list, for me it didn’t go any further. I didn’t check the notebooks. Especially since with only a day of training to learn how to identify a horse by its coat, this veterinarian specializing in cattle says he did not have the skills to do so. “We had no reason to doubt the honesty of Mr. Larnaudie, I was not the policeman who was going to check”, replies the veterinarian when the president of the court points out to him that, among the notebooks, many do not were not those of the horses they had in front of them.
For him, as for his colleagues, it was up to the official agent of the department’s veterinary services to verify the identity of the horse. However, this was based on the elements… provided by the authorized veterinarian on site. Over the course of the trial, a system of control thus emerges, on the fringes of the fraud, where everyone sends their responsibility to another level, the last being the door of the slaughterhouse. A dismissal having been pronounced in favor of the veterinarian and three technicians of the Narbonne slaughterhouse, of which Patrick Rochette was one of the main shareholders, this word will not be heard during the trial.
If there was “a lack of diligence, even negligence” in the control of the horses, “it is not established that (these personnel) acted in bad faith”, noted the investigating judge, dismissing Thus the deception, From November 2014, the national order of lawyers in any case withdrew the right of identifying veterinarians to insert loose sheets allowing slaughter, on the grounds that the practice “was not well framed” . It’s the least we can say.