May 25, 2012

 

Vietnamese police seizes Ensure milk cans with incorrect labels

 

 

More than 10,000 Ensure milk cans which were being tagged with wrong labels have been seized on May 22 by the police at three houses in Vietnam's central city of Hue, the newspaper reported. 

 

Ton Nu Cam Dung, Nguyen Van Sanh and Nguyen Van Be, the owners of the houses, failed to show the police any documents to prove the origin of the milk, the newspaper said.

 

All these people told investigators that they had been hired by Nguyen Khoi Tin from Ho Chi Minh City to replace the yellow labels of milk products with the blue ones since November 2011.

 

The label replacement was done manually and fake blue labels had been provided to Tin by a man named Phong, also from HCM City, they said.

 

The replacement was made since the price of Ensure milk with blue label is higher than that of those with yellow ones. In addition, consumers prefer Ensure milk with blue labels to that with yellow labels, police said.

 

A chief police was quoted as saying that this may be a trade fraud case.

 

Initial investigation results showed that Tin had bought Ensure milk from Minh Dat Phu One Member Co Ltd in Danang City.

 

Most of the 10,000 milk cans had been smuggled from Thailand and brought into Vietnam illegally via border gates in Tay Ninh and Quang Tri provinces.

 

Phan Van Thanh, deputy head of the Thua Thien-Hue provincial Market Management Sub-department said the agency has yet to detect fake Ensure milk in the province so far this year.

 

Meanwhile, fake Ensure milk had been discovered at a company in HCM City's District 11 last April, local authorities said.

 

Ensure milk, products of the US' firm Abbott Laboratories S.A's has been distributed exclusively by 3A Nutrition (Vietnam) Co Ltd in HCM City which distributes US-produced Ensure Gold Vigor and another Ensure milk product in liquid form in 250-millilitre cans imported from the Netherlands.

 

The company is not responsible for the quality of any Ensure products that do not originate from these two countries, the firm said.