Tainted oil dealer given death penalty, huge fine

GUIYANG - A court in southwest China's Guizhou Province gave the death penalty with a two-year reprieve to a cooking oil salesman who sold thousands of tonnes of cooking oil made from the waste of slaughtered cattle.

Wei Mingjin was fined 340 million yuan (56 million US dollars) and had all his property confiscated, the Anshun Intermediate People's Court announced in the first-instance ruling.

The court also gave two of Wei's accomplices prison terms of 15 years and 2 years respectively.

Wei was the corporate representative of Jin'an Food Development Co., which was registered in Anshun City as an edible oil, animal husbandry and agricultural processing business. The court found the company made bulk purchases of waste of slaughtered cattle between Jan. 2009 and May 2013 to produce "cooking oil", which is believed to be unfit for human consumption.

Trading records showed the company sold 19,000 tonnes of the tainted lard to Sichuan Province and Chongqing Municipality with total revenue of 170 million yuan.

Wei and one of his accomplices on Monday made appeal to the provincial higher court.

Food safety has become a top concern in China as a string of safety scandals, particularly in 2008 when melamine-tainted baby formula caused the deaths of at least six infants and sickened 300,000 others, have crippled customer confidence.

The Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate issued interpretations to set standards for the punishment for these crimes in 2013 in order to form a more rigorous system checking food safety violators.