British beef claims hit French food chain

Buffalo Grill, a French fast-food chain, saw its shares collapse yesterday after it was accused of illegally buying British beef while exports were banned by the European Union in the BSE scare.

Shares fell by more than 90 per cent and trading in the firm was suspended. Two senior company officials have been accused of fraud, and the president and another senior official were arrested.

The case has arisen out of a wider criminal investigation into the responsibility of French, British and EU officials for the spread to France of new variant CJD – the human equivalent of BSE.

The judge in charge of the investigation, Marie-Odile Bertella-Geffroy, noticed that two of the French victims were frequent customers at Buffalo Grill.

Evidence was collated from employees and raids on company files. It is believed that unknown quantities of British beef were knowingly bought by Buffalo Grill executives at bargain prices in the late 1990s. The meat was exported to a third country, which had not adopted the ban, and then re-labelled and exported to France.

The firm's lawyers said there was "a complete absence of material proof" that the chain had broken the ban, and that it imported most of its meat from South America.

Lawyers for the families of the French CJD victims have argued that because CJD has a five-year incubation period, they must have been contaminated before 1996, when British beef sales to France were still legal.