Repackage livers result in sentence for Pensacola exporter

Repackage livers result in sentence for Pensacola exporter A former meat exporter who operated out of the Port of Pensacola has been sentenced to 10-and-a-half months in prison for his role in sending a shipment fraudulently labeled and contaminated beef livers to Egypt.
   The 1998 shipment led to an Egyptian ban on the products of a major U.S. beef producer that originally supplied the livers, according to a report in the Pensacola News-Journal.
   U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson Wednesday sentenced Salem Mohamed Abdel Hady, an Egyptian national, after a previous guilty plea to a specific charge that Hady had handled beef at an establishment that was not properly authorized for that purpose. Hady has been in jail since his arrest last July and will serve another 15 days after getting credit for time served.
   The report cited court records that said Hady, 61, was one of the partners in Illinois-based Hady Enterprises Inc., which operated in Pensacola from 1997 to 2001 as Pensacola Cold Storage.
   The report said Hady's lawyer, David McGee, explained that Hady Enterprises had purchased 5.5 million pounds of select beef livers from the South Dakota beef producer IBP Inc. with the intention of shipping the meat to a customer in Russia. However, because of problems with the Russian economy in 1998, the company was unable to complete the sale.
   The company then decided to sell the livers to a buyer in Egypt. Under Egyptian law, meat imports must be packaged under specific guidelines and have Arabic-language labels showing the animals had been slaughtered in accordance with Islamic rituals.
   Court documents said Hady Enterprises employees, under the direction of management, repackaged the livers to make it appear IBP had prepared the meat for shipment to Egypt. In the process, some of the lives were exposed to open air and contaminated by the ink used for the Arabic-language labels.
   McGee said Hady Enterprises had been faced with the prospect of dumping the entire shipment, and under 'unique and extreme circumstances' made the decision to try to move the product to Egypt.
   When Egyptian officials discovered what had happened, they banned IBP, which at the time had been selling 20 million pounds of beef liver a year to Egypt.
   IBP sued Hady Enterprises, and in 2002, a federal court judge awarded IBP $4.4 million in compensatory and punitive damages, the report noted.