A grim legal first killed this firm
By Christopher Booker, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 1:14am GMT 10/12/2006

Members of the House of Lords were shocked last Wednesday to hear, from Lord
Willoughby de Broke, the extraordinary story behind the closure in October of a
Lancashire cheese firm, employing 26 people.

John Wright had built up Bowland Dairies in Nelson into an £8-million-a- year
business making curd cheese, mostly exported to five EU countries, including
France and Germany, for use in quiches and flans. On June 12, inspectors of the
European Commission's Food and Veterinary Office (FVO) visited the plant for 90
minutes, looked through the paperwork and, after misinterpreting one document,
issued a "rapid alert notice" that its products were unsafe. The milk in the
cheese, they claimed, broke EU rules on antibiotic residues.

On June 20, after thoroughly inspecting the plant, Britain's Food Standards
Agency (FSA) strongly disagreed. It recommended one or two minor changes in
procedure, and allowed production to resume.

On July 4 the commission repeated its claim that the milk did not comply with EU
rules. The FSA responded that the FVO inspectors seemed to be confused over the
type of milk the firm used. Telling the European Standing Committee on the Food
Chain that "no evidence was found that contaminated milk was used", the FSA
issued a notice to all EU member states that Bowland's cheese was entirely safe
and fit for market. The commission appended its own negative comments to this
notice, effectively maintaining the ban.

Black propaganda began to appear, claiming that the firm had been selling cheese
contaminated with cleaning fluid and sweepings from the floor. Bowland took the
commission before the ECJ and, on September 8, Judge Bo Vesterdorf, president of
the Court of First Instance, having reviewed the case legally and
scientifically, found unreservedly in the company's favour.

The commission was ordered to withdraw its notice and its comments about the
firm. Twice it refused. On September 12 Vesterdorf ordered it to "stand aside".
The commission tried to add a statement to the court order, claiming that it had
lost on a mere technicality. The judge ordered this to be removed, observing:
"It is sad that a company is dying while giants fight it out".

On September 27 the FVO returned to Bowland, this time for an exhaustive two-day
inspection, but could find little wrong. (Any findings, the commission's chief
inspector told Mr Wright, would be "non-emergency" .)

However, on October 4, the commission asked its standing committee to approve a
commission decision banning Bowland from further trading. The 25 members present
were not shown the court's judgment or any technical evidence, other than a
defence of the new procedure for testing antibiotic residues – from the firm
which had devised it. Twenty two countries voted for a total ban, with Britain
abstaining.

The commission announced that it would seek to have the UK food safety
authorities fined for failing to protect consumers against contaminated milk
(despite the court ruling and the lack of any evidence of contamination) .
Furthermore Britain was warned that the FVO was about to carry out a full audit
of Britain's £5-billion-a- year cheese industry.

Despite the FSA's solid support of Bowland and its insistence that no rules had
been broken, the Department of Health bowed to the commission's diktat. On
October 16 it rushed through a statutory instrument, the Curd Cheese
(Restriction on Placing on the Market) Regulations 2006, to take immediate
effect. Section 3 read "No person shall place on the market any curd cheese
manufactured by Bowland Dairy Products Limited".

Never before, it is believed, has a statutory instrument been issued in Britain
directed at closing down a single named company (breaching the ancient principle
of British law that "the law must be blind", i.e. it must be general in
application, not directed at any specific individual or body).

When Lord Willoughby de Broke recounted this chilling story last week,
eloquently supported by others, including Lord Greaves, a Lib Dem who lives near
Mr Wright's plant, peers were visibly horrified. The only defence that Lord
Warner, as junior health minister, could muster (apart from seriously
misrepresenting the terms of Vesterdorf's judgment) was to plead that failure to
implement the commission's decision "would constitute a serious breach of the
UK's obligations under the EC Treaty". For truth, justice, the rule of law and
Britain it was a black day.
http://www.telegrap h.co.uk/news/ main.jhtml? xml=/news/ 2006/12/10/ nbook10.xml