7 March 2008 – Some 23 people were arrested in raids across Italy, and 85 farms and 23 oil processing plants were seized in a crackdown on fake Italian olive oil, British media report.
Lower quality olives were imported from Tunisia, Greece and Spain, then crushed in Italy and the resulting product was sold off as olive oil made in Italy. Sales of this fake Italian olive oil were worth an estimated €39 million ($70.5 million).
The criminals involved had also falsely obtained €6.5 million ($10 million) in EU subsidies for growing olives.
The fake olive oil business is thriving in Italy. "In the last year alone, there has been an increase of 25 per cent in fake olive oil", a spokesman for Coldiretti, the Italian farmers' union, was quoted as saying.
Another type of fraud consists in blending olive oil with cheaper oils.
The operation, code named "Golden Oil", highlights the battle waged by European countries to protect their national and regional products by enforcing existing laws. At the beginning of this year, Belgium destroyed 3,000 bottles of Californian wine which had been illegally labelled as "Champagne", as reported on FLEXNEWS.