Jubilee Foods cleared of selling fake ‘Gozo’ honey

A Gozo court has cleared the managing director of Jubilee Foods, Alexander Scicluna, of criminal charges related to allegations that the company had been mislabelling honey.

The case dates back to 2012, when Scicluna had been hit with a plethora of criminal charges relating to the importing of substandard foreign honey, which was then alleged to have been misleadingly packaged and sold as Gozo Honey. 

Honey is considered to be substandard when it contains too high a level of sucrose, in comparison to fructose and glucose.

The charges had been made after the Department of Agriculture carried out an inspection, following reports that the food producer had been selling foreign honey, mislabelled as originating from Gozo.

Pharmacist and agricultural chemical specialist Dr. Everaldo Attard had been appointed to analyse samples of honey seized from the outlet at the Gozitano Complex, but had reported that officials from the Department of Agriculture had not followed the procedure required by law in collecting the samples. Scicluna had not even received a control sample as per procedure, the court had been told.

Magistrate Joe Mifsud, presiding the Court of Magistrates (Gozo), expressed serious doubts as to whether the product in the unlabelled jar, retrieved during the inspection, had actually contained the same product being sold as Jubilee Foods honey in the first place. The court pointed out that just a few months before the failed inspection, an inspection by the Health Department had not found anything untoward.

In addition, the court held that as the jar was not labelled, the charge of mislabelling the product was also not proven.

The judgement quotes a recent case, also involving honey, in which judge Silvio Camilleri, presiding the Court of Appeal had criticised the inspections carried out by the Department of Agriculture. In that case, no evidence had been presented to satisfy that court that the officials taking the samples were qualified to do so under the Food Safety Act.

Magistrate Mifsud heard Inspector Josric Mifsud explain that the sample jar had never been in the possession of the police, having instead been held by the Department of Agriculture. Neither had there been any instruction to seal the samples before they were conveyed to the expert.

In the judgement, the court stressed the importance of the prosecution having sufficient evidence to support their case before pressing charges, especially in cases such as this, which “could have very serious consequences on the commercial reputation of the accused, who then had to wait five years for justice to be done.”