“
I made a mistake, we played with the papers
”: Patrick Rochette, meat wholesaler, admitted on Tuesday January 10, before the Marseille criminal court, to have introduced into the human food chain reformed horses from a farm-laboratory of Sanofi-Pasteur, by falsifying their documents.
"
All life, it's been a hassle with the papers
", tried to justify himself, in the face of questions from President Céline Ballerini, the main of the 25 defendants tried for three weeks, since Monday, in this vast trial of fraud in horse meat.
Concealment of information
In the horse drug treatment book, Patrick Rochette, 68, replaced the initial sheet with a blank sheet, bearing the words "
definitively excluded from human consumption
".
Abundant white hair, a somewhat fatalistic look on his face, the defendant admitted to having had at least thirty horses from the Alba-la-Romaine (Ardèche) laboratory farm of the French pharmaceutical giant slaughtered in Narbonne (Aude). .
Horses reformed after having been used for several years in the manufacture of anti-rabies or anti-venom serums.
A branded "S" on the horses
At the hearing, Me Xavier Vahramian, the laboratory's lawyer, who filed a civil suit, recalled that these horses bore the laboratory's "
S
" mark on their rump, with iron, but also nodules and cysts on the neck, related to repeated injections.
So many stigmas that made them very identifiable.
“
Me, of course, I knew, I knew that they were laboratory horses.
But I had seen them pass these horses for 25 years, they were authorized.
Their status has changed
,” tried to explain Patrick Rochette.
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In 2004, Sanofi-Pasteur had indeed decided to prohibit these animals from the human food industry, even if a judicial expertise ruled out any toxicological risk for consumers.
“
I understood that it was prohibited in principle, but never in my head I thought of poisoning someone
”, he defended himself in response to questions from the court.
“Rochette never told me it was for slaughter”
Fabrice Daniel, farmer and horse trader in the Gard, who sold these horses to Patrick Rochette, bought back for 10 euros each from Sanofi after their reform, assured that he did not know that the animals ended up in butchers.
“
Rochette never told me it was for slaughter.
I would never have thought that these horses were going to be slaughtered, otherwise I would have reacted, I would have at least warned Sanofi
, ”supported Fabrice Daniel.
“
Can we reasonably think that Fabrice Daniel was unaware of the destination of the horses?
asks Céline Ballerini to Patrick Rochette.
In response, the Narbonnais chevillard clears his throat.
Telephone tapping
In police custody, Fabrice Daniel admitted to knowing that Patrick Rochette removed the mention of the ban on slaughter from the invoices and passports of the animals.
"
I said anything, the gendarmes wanted to crack me up
," he said on Tuesday.
Concerning Patrick Rochette, numerous wiretaps prove in any case his maneuvers to circumvent the regulations: "
These mares, if they do not have papers, I can arrange for export
", he indicates to a correspondent in a discussion.
An excellent connoisseur of regulations that were being put in place at the beginning of the 2010s, Patrick Rochette frequently suggested to his interlocutors that they “
get by
”, saying that he knew slaughterhouses that were “
less attentive
”, less picky about controls.
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A month before his arrest, in December 2013, he was still bragging on the phone: “
I found a slaughterhouse that will kill us all
”.
At that time, faced with tougher controls at the Narbonne slaughterhouse, Patrick Rochette seemed to be refocusing his activity on slaughtering in Spain, Girona or Barcelona, or Italy.