Andronicos Sideras and Ulrik Nielsen jailed for roles in ‘greed-motivated’ plot to pass off 30 tonnes of horsemeat as beef

Two men have been jailed for their roles in a conspiracy to pass off 30 tonnes of horsemeat as beef – a plot “motivated by greed” that was one part of the wide-ranging horsemeat scandal that came to light in 2013.

Andronicos Sideras, 55, was sentenced to four and a half years, while his co-conspirator, 58-year-old Ulrik Nielsen, was jailed for three and a half years at Inner London crown court on Monday. A third man, 44-year-old Alex Beech, was given a suspended sentence.



The plot was “not confined to this country, not confined to the firms we have heard about, and it’s a big issue for the public to be concerned about, but the fact is it was discovered by accident and only emerged as a problem because of your activity”, the judge, Owen Davies QC, told the men as he passed sentence on Monday.



“It’s not a mitigating factor, in my judgment, that other people were at it as well as you.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Andronicos Sideras pleaded not guilty to conspiring to defraud customers. Photograph: Isabel Infantes/PA

Sideras, of Southgate, London, was convicted at trial last week after pleading not guilty to conspiring to defraud customers by adding the horsemeat to batches of beef and relabelling them as pure beef.



The conspiracy involved Nielsen’s Danish firm, FlexiFoods, shipping consignments of horsemeat to Sideras’s premises in north London, where they were mixed with beef, repackaged and relabelled as the latter. Beech was Nielsen’s “right-hand man” and worked in FlexiFoods’ UK office, where he arranged for the shipments to be transferred and handled the accounting.



On Monday, the judge told the men: “It’s difficult to recall now the conditions that made this horsemeat scandal headline news every day five years ago but it made an impact on the public in general.

“They were suspicious of the food that they had – it extended far beyond meat.

“The confidence in the food chain was affected adversely, and the share prices of big supermarkets were affected, and it is difficult to recreate the feeling of anxiety that the public had at the time this all emerged.

“It was not an activity that was brought to an end by anything other than the arrest of the perpetrators.

“The victims in question, properly so-called, of conspiracy to defraud were customers, either wholesalers or the customers of the markets and supermarkets who bought an item that was not what it said it was.”

The prosecutor, Jonathan Polnay, described the conspiracy as a simple process during Sideras’s trial. “In 2012, beef sold for around €3 [£2.60] a kilogram at wholesale prices. Horsemeat was cheaper. At the time, it sold for around €2 [£1.75] a kilogram.” The money was made by selling the mix as 100% beef.

The majority of the meat, including some from farm horses not sold for slaughter, made it into the food chain and, while the face value of the fraud was £177,869, police said the true cost had probably run into millions of pounds.



Sideras, the boss of Dinos & Sons, claimed he was only holding perfectly legal loads of horsemeat for his business contacts and said he had only relabelled some of it because the pallets had been damaged in transit and needed to be restacked.



He was arrested in July 2013 after his fingerprints were found on suspect labels attached to a shipment of what investigators found to be a mix of about 30% horsemeat and 70% beef in Northern Ireland.

The load also contained microchips for one Irish and two Polish horses that had previously been owned as pets or riding horses. Their original owners had not been aware that they had been sold on for slaughter.

Each of the men was convicted of a single count of conspiracy to defraud between 1 January and 30 November 2012.