Scam artists in poisoned pet food scandal destroy evidence

First – your tax dollars at work?!

Scam artists in the thriving food additive export industry are quickly giving the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) the reputation of Keystone Cops.

FDA officials made much of heading off to the Orient to get down to the roots of the melamine sickening and killing off thousands of cats and dogs in the ongoing contaminated pet food scandal. But even as they were telling us “Bon Voyage”, melamine bossman Mao Lijun, who exported tainted wheat products to Las Vegas-based ChemNutra, was razing his own building.

That’s ONE way to get rid of evidence!

“It wasn’t authorities that finally acted: Mao himself razed the brick factory–days before the investigators from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration arrived in China on a mission to track down the source of the tainted pet food ingredients.” (latimes.com, May 9, 2007).

Not only did this perp scam us, he apparently did a pretty thorough job of fouling his own nest:

…Mao Lijun territory: “Farmers in this poor rural area about 400 miles northwest of Shanghai had complained to local government officials since 2004 that Mao’s factory was spewing noxious fumes that made their eyes tear up and the poplar trees nearby shed their leaves prematurely. Yet no one stopped Mao’s company from churning out bags of food powders and belching smoke–until one day last month when, in the middle of the night, bulldozers arrived and tore down the facility.

“In the end, Chinese authorities caught up with Mao and arrested him. And Tuesday, after weeks of denials, China acknowledged that Mao’s company and another Chinese business had illegally exported wheat and rice products spiked with melamine, a chemical used in making plastics and fertilizers. That chemical is banned in foods in the U.S.”

Yowch! You do NOT want to get arrested by the ChiComs, but it couldn’t have happened to a better guy.