Former Head of Chinese Dairy Pleads Guilty to Covering

01/02/2009


The Ovaltine exec. should be on the chopping board next. The former executive, Tian Wenhua, is one of the highest ranking corporate executives to go on trial in China and could face life imprisonment or even the death sentence if convicted. Since September, when the scandal became public, investigations have shown how widespread the problem of tainted milk is in China, with watered-down milk being doctored with a chemical used in plastics and fertilizer to falsely raise its protein count. The chemical, melamine, can cause kidney stones and other ailments, and the tainted formula sickened nearly 300,000 children and killed 6. The government has accused Sanlu and other big Chinese companies of failing to monitor the quality of their powdered baby formula, and in some cases covering up knowledge that their products contained high levels of melamine. The scandal, which follows others in China’s food and drug industries, has devastated the country’s dairy industry, prompted global recalls of suspect food products, and forced the Chinese authorities to try to demonstrate a new seriousness in enforcement. Ms. Tian’s plea came on the first day of a trial that involves three other Sanlu executives. The court said that consumer complaints about Sanlu’s milk came in as early as December 2007. Ms. Tian said she knew the company was selling contaminated formula by May 2008, but did not report the problem to local government officials until August. Between May and September, when Sanlu stopped production, prosecutors said the company made more than 900 tons of melamine-contaminated powdered formula. Until Wednesday, company officials had maintained that they learned of the problem only in August. That is when executives at the Fonterra Group of New Zealand, which owns a large stake in Sanlu, said they became aware of a problem and pushed Sanlu to issue a recall. The Fonterra executives said they believed that their warnings, on the eve of the Beijing Olympics, had reached government officials in the capital. But so far investigations have focused mostly on local officials, though the head of the country’s product-safety watchdog, the General Administration of Quality Supervision and Quarantine, resigned. The trial involving Ms. Tian is in the city of Shijiazhuang, in the northern province of Hebei, where Sanlu is based. This week, an intermediate court rejected requests by some foreign journalists to attend. On Wednesday, Chinese state-controlled media broadcast images of Ms. Tian, 66, looking pale and ill, standing handcuffed before a microphone in a yellow jacket acknowledging her guilt. According to state media reports, Ms. Tian said she was told in August 2008 that European standards allowed up to 20 milligrams of melamine per kilogram to be present in food products. In September, some Sanlu products were found to have over 2,000 milligrams per kilogram. Wang Yuliang, another former Sanlu executive on trial, appeared in a wheelchair. State-run media outlets said he tried to commit suicide in 2008. Sanlu filed for bankruptcy protection last week. Several high-ranking Shijiazhuang government officials have been fired for not guarding public safety. In 2007, after earlier product-safety scandals, the head of China’s State Food and Drug Administration was executed after he was found guilty of corruption and dereliction of duty as a regulator. SOURCE: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/01/world/asia/01milk.html?_r=1&hp classic layouts