Prison sentence for Greeks who wanted to sell sunflower oil as olive oil
Olive oil is sacred in Greece; you really shouldn’t mess with it. And understandably so: Greek olive oil is heavenly and so much tastier than what you find, for example, in Dutch supermarkets (and that stuff is often considerably more expensive, too). You can taste the difference immediately, which is why I don’t understand the thinking of the two arrested Greeks; they wanted to sell sunflower oil as olive oil, and it cost them dearly.
They are now behind bars after buying thousands of litres of sunflower oil from Bulgaria and planning to label it as if it were Greek olive oil.
Olive oil is a gold mine
The pair bought more than 13,000 litres, and you can make a lot of money from that; due to extreme drought, olive oil has risen considerably in price. The price of extra virgin olive oil, for example, has tripled compared with last year (!) Yes, those two from Thessaloniki clearly saw dollar signs and thought they could make a big profit with their cheap sunflower oil.
When the police raided the premises, they found 6,644 litres already packed in tins bearing the false labels (with various Greek regions where the olive oil supposedly came from), as well as around 6,500 litres of sunflower oil that still had to be dyed (so it would get the right colour) and lots of empty tins that still had to be filled. The NOS website has a video of the raid.
Not a successful family business
The suspects are an 80-year-old man and his 36-year-old son, who probably made the wrong choice for the direction of their family business. Because as I said: the Greeks take olive oil very seriously, so there’s a good chance they’ll be behind bars for quite some time…
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Source: NOS
