What started as the recall of a few dodgy burgers off supermarket shelves in Ireland in January has since become a Europe-wide scandal where the integrity of the food supply chain has been called into question. Consumers want to know how tons of horse meat came to be labelled as beef and then resold across Europe by some of the biggest names in food, including Nestlé and Findus.

The problem is secrecy. Unscrupulous people are able to pass off products that aren’t what they say they are along complex supply chains that use shell companies. In the case of this equine flesh scandal, although the horse meat started its journey labelled as such from a Romanian abattoir, by the time it ended up in France it was transformed into ‘beef’. Its physical journey had taken it across Europe to the Netherlands and then to France. The paperwork, however, had ping-ponged from Romania, to the Netherlands, to Cyprus and – in at least one instance, according to an investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project – to the well-known secrecy jurisdiction of the British Virgin Islands.

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