Not everything labelled 'extra virgin' is immaculately conceived; it seems there are some very slippery customers in the olive oil trade, and the problem is spreading

The Italian fraud squad recently announced they were investigating allegations that the country's largest olive oil producers have adulterated Italian oil with cheaper imports from Spain, Greece, Morocco and Tunisia.

While this investigation has just come to light, fraud in the Italian olive oil industry is very old indeed. Amphorae used to store olive oil in ancient Rome display several anti-fraud measures, including clear labelling and a primitive form of "traceability". In the original Godfather novel, Mario Puzo modelled Vito Corleone on a real-life olive oil mafioso named Joe Profaci. Just this month, an American writer living in Liguria named Tom Mueller published a book about fraud in the Italian olive oil industry. The text develops an interesting article on the subject he wrote for the New Yorker in 2007.



Mueller found that fraud was extensive, particularly adulteration and false labelling. The world's largest former dealer in olive oil, one Domenico Ribatti, plea-bargained his way to 13 months in prison during the 1990s for passing off Turkish hazelnut oil, which he had refined in his own plant, as olive oil. Another prominent importer, Leonardo Marseglia – appropriately based in a town called Monopoli – has variously been accused of selling cheap non-European oils as Italian ones, fudging documents to shirk import tariffs and forming a criminal network to smuggle contraband. Marseglia has denied the charges.

A 2007 EU investigation found that 95% of all known misappropriations of EU agricultural subsidies occurred in Italy, telling us something of the culture in which Italian olive oil fraud was taking place. George Bennell is the managing director of Belazu, which markets a delicious unfiltered olive oil from a small producer northern Spain, among other goods. (Declaration of interest: the company once paid for me to visit the groves.) "I don't know for sure that Spanish olive oil fraud is less common than Italian," he says. "But the fact is, the Spanish produce twice as much olive oil as the Italians, and the Italians consume and export more olive oil than they can produce, so they have to import it."

Olive oil is far from being the only commonly adulterated food finding its way into British supermarkets. A British trading standards officer said last month that "criminals are moving away from drug offences to counterfeiting [food ingredients], because they are looking at severely reduced jail times. You are looking at 10 years plus for drugs, whereas it's half that for counterfeiting." This echoes what one EU investigator told Tom Mueller: "Profits [in olive oil fraud] were comparable to cocaine trafficking, with none of the risks."

Only last week consumers were warned again about counterfeit vodka, and one recent estimate based on data from the Food Standards Agency suggested that fraud could affect as much as 10% of all the food we buy in this country. This includes "wild" salmon that is actually nothing of the kind – it's estimated one in seven salmon sold as wild have in fact been farmed – to the labelling of products as organic and so on, in order to exploit specific scruples in the customers.

In 2010, a Midlands businessman was jailed for a £3m scam in which he labelled battery eggs as free range and sold them to retailers including Tesco and Sainsbury's. A few years earlier, an investigation found that basmati rice was being mixed with cheaper rice costing half as much. This kind of thing does appear to be on the rise - when a family friend arrived at Christmas last year with a magnum of Pol Roger, everyone was delighted; upon examination, the label looked to have been printed on a domestic inkjet.