A London businessman has been found guilty of conspiring to defraud customers by adding horsemeat to batches of beef and relabelling them as pure beef.

Horsemeat scandal: timeline Read more

Andronicos Sideras of Southgate, London, was convicted on Wednesday following a three-week trial at Inner London crown court.

The 55-year-old, who was originally from Cyprus, worked with two other men who traded out of Hull to pass off cheaper horsemeat as beef for processing into burgers and ready meals. Ulrik Nielsen, 58, of Gentofte, Denmark, and Alex Beech, 44, of Sutton-on-Hull, had previously pleaded guilty to their part in the conspiracy. Nielsen and Beech had been trading as FlexiFoods. All three will be sentenced next week.

In 2013, the UK Food Standards Agency asked the City of London police to investigate the fraud, following the discovery of horsemeat in high street beefburgers by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland.

During searches of FlexiFoods offices in Hull and Denmark, emails and other documents were uncovered which provided evidence of the conspiracy. FlexiFoods arranged to have horsemeat from Ireland and Polish beef shipped to Sideras’s north London premises, where they were mixed together and relabelled with fake labels, before being sent on to other firms as part of the horsemeat scandal that came to the public’s attention in 2013.



“The consequence of this fraud was that consumers and food processors alike were not only out of pocket financially, because they were being done over, but they were being deceived about what they were eating,” the jury of five men and seven women heard during the trial.

The prosecutor, Jonathan Polnay, told the court that the fraud was a simple process. “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.” Money was thus made by selling the mix as 100% beef.



Sideras, who ran the firm Dinos & Sons, was found to have created “false paperwork and labels to make it look like all the meat being supplied was beef”.



The Danish-owned FlexiFoods would buy horsemeat and beef from other traders across Europe and have it delivered to Dinos & Sons in Tottenham. Sideras denied being part of the conspiracy and told the jury he was only storing horsemeat shipments for FlexiFoods.

He admitted his firm had changed some labels on the consignments, but insisted that was only because the pallets needed to be repacked after being damaged in transit. “We have never purchased, used or sold horsemeat,” he claimed. Ownership of the horsemeat did in fact stay with the trader FlexiFoods, but physically it moved through Dinos’ store. Sideras admitted he had faked the official health stamps of other factories and that he had destroyed emails from Nielsen around the time the horsemeat scandal broke.

Sideras was arrested in July 2013 and his fingerprints were found on pallet labels attached to a consignment of mixed horse and beef meat that had been intended for burgers but had been detained in Northern Ireland. These labels had been deliberately altered to make it look as though the load was 100% beef but when it was tested it was in fact about 30% horse. 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.



DC Stephen Briars, the officer who led the case for the City of London police’s fraud squad said the case had been “unique and challenging”, adding: “These three men set out to deceive the suppliers, retailers and ultimately the consumer so that they could make more money.”

City of London police worked with local authorities, the Food Standards Agency and the food industry to gather the evidence needed and inquiries spanned Denmark, Ireland, Poland, France, Holland and Italy.