It would be great to think that store shelves are free of antibiotic-laden, watered down or bogus honey.
The feds – from Immigration and Customs Enforcement to other investigative arms of Homeland Security – continue to crack down on honey launderers who, more often then not, still succeed in bringing illegal honey into the U.S. and Canada.
But chip away the honey cops do. On Friday, Hung Ta Fan, aka Michael Fan, a Taiwanese executive of several honey import companies, was sentenced to 30 months in prison for conspiring to avoid more than $5 million in U.S. anti-dumping duties by illegally importing Chinese-origin honey that was falsely identified as coming from South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and India.
The 40-year-old smuggler, who owned and operated multiple California-based honey import companies, was sentenced in the Northern District of Illinois to 30 months in prison and was ordered to pay $5,378,370 in restitution. He pleaded guilty to the charges in August.
Fan admitted that between 2005 and 2006 he conspired with others to illegally bring into the United States 98 shipments of Chinese honey to avoid paying the duties imposed in the 90s to prevent the Chinese from flooding the U.S. market with cheap, often illegal honey.
“Mr. Fan and others deliberately mislabeled 98 shipments of honey in an effort to rob the U.S. government of more than $5 million in tariffs,” said ICE Director John Morton. “Our domestic honey industry is economically threatened when importers illegally dump low-cost Chinese honey into the U.S. marketplace. This prison sentence sends a strong message domestically and internationally that ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations aggressively investigate criminals who conceal the true origins of their products in the name of greed.”
In return for a reduced sentence, Fan admitted to investigators that last year he also conspired with others to fraudulently import about $8 million of honey that was diluted and blended with 20 to 30 percent artificial sugar. He admitted to adding artificial sugar to the honey in an effort to obtain a higher price and profit margin than if the shipments contained pure honey.
This brings to almost 20 the number of foreign honey launderers that federal authorities have captured. However, many of the importers, packagers and sellers of honey tell me the substandard and often illegal nectar continues to flood across the borders both in tiny plastic bears lining store shelves and in tanker cars delivered to the factories of food processors.
Most of the players I’ve interviewed over the past two years say the smuggling will not end until the processors find the integrity to say no or the Food and Drug Administration decides to enforce its laws.
