The man was sentenced for selling rice cakes with the added antiseptic preservative, and was compensated 10 times the public welfare compensation according to the sales

Official account of the Chinese court network Figure

In order to delay the deterioration of rice cakes, Wei Mou, a man in Huzhou, Zhejiang Province, added a prohibited food preservative to the rice cakes produced.

On December 14, The Paper (www.thepaper.cn) learned from the Nantaihu Lake Court in Huzhou City that Wei was sentenced to 9 months' imprisonment and fined 70,000 yuan for the crime of producing and selling food that did not meet safety standards, and was prohibited from engaging in food production, sales and related activities for three years from the date of completion of the punishment or the date of parole. In addition to being subject to criminal punishment, Wei should also bear the corresponding civil tort liability, so he was ordered to pay a total of 340,000 yuan in compensation for ten times the price of rice cakes that did not meet safety standards, and publicly apologized to the public in the media at or above the Huzhou municipal level.

In 2015, Wei ran a food processing service department, which can produce about 1,100 kilograms of rice cakes per day and sell them to vegetable farms and noodle shops. Because of the slow selling and bulk rice cakes are not easy to store, Wei added a food additive that was explicitly prohibited. From November 2017 to September 2020, Mr. Wei was punished by the municipal supervision department three times for producing and operating food that exceeded the scope and limit of the use of food additives, and the cumulative amount of fines and forfeitures was as high as more than 85,000 yuan.

However, Wei Mou, who was punished, did not give up, and heard that there was a preservative that although long-term excessive intake would endanger human health but was not easy to detect, he desperately added it to the rice cake. However, this is not the case, in March 2021, the market supervision department still investigated and punished the prohibited ingredient from the rice cake films produced in Wei's shop, and Wei was transferred to the public security organs. After investigation, Wei repeatedly instructed employees (handled in a separate case) to add prohibited preservatives to the rice cakes and sell them, with a total sales amount of more than 34,000 yuan and illegal profits of more than 5,500 yuan.

Subsequently, the Wuxing District Procuratorate filed a public prosecution against Wei for producing and selling food that did not meet safety standards. Because Wei's behavior also endangered the legitimate rights and interests of unspecified consumers and harmed the public interest, the procuratorate also filed a public interest lawsuit in addition to criminal proceedings.