Meat scandal puts Bucharest back in the pillory

A new scandal has tarnished Romania’s image in the EU. The discovery of horsemeat from Romania in lasagna supposed to contain beef from a well-known brand in Europe shows once again “our inability to comply with a minimum set of rules without which no community can function”, writes România liberă.

The single market, notes the paper, allows “a Romanian slaughterhouse to export meat to a Cypriot wholesaler, who then sells it on to a company in Luxembourg, who then gives it to a Swedish company that puts it onto the market in the United Kingdom through its subsidiary in France.” This is an advantage if “all Member States fulfil their duties responsibly,” it adds. But “if the chain of trust that connects institutions and the European countries is broken, even if just by the fault of a single link, it is the foundation of the European project itself that absorbs the blow.”

For the paper, this situation

brings grist to the mills not only of British xenophobes, but also to the mills of all those who still argue that Romania should never have been accepted into the EU.

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Another Romanian daily, Adevărul, writes that even if the company that ”packaged and exported the meat” ought to be at the top of the list of suspects, “all eyes are on Romania, because it is Romania where the meat comes from.” The proposal from a British Conservative MP to slap restrictions on our exports, and then on all imports from the European Union, shows once again that “it is all our fault, and that all the wrongs done to the UK come from here.”

Liberă România concludes:

What is ironic and sad in this story is that even if it turns out that no one in Romania did anything wrong in this scandal, it will go unnoticed. Now that everyone has grown used to thinking of us as liars and cheats, the fact that for once we may have been falsely accused is irrelevant.