A merchant who supplied 100 tons of sub-standard meat to snack bars in big German cities was given an 18- month jail term and fined Friday, but judges rejected claims in the media last year that the meat had been "rotten", dpa reported.
The disclosure that non-certified meat was being mixed into doner kebab meat, a popular take-away food, climaxed a series of revelations about condemned meat being sold as fresh. Doner sales plunged and some nations reviewed imports of German meat.
The court at Itzehoe, north-west of Hamburg, convicted the merchant, 54, on 1,262 counts of fraud and fined him 9,800 euros (15,500 dollars), the amount it assessed as his profit in the scam.
The German media headlined the case and others like it "the rotten meat scandal."
On Friday however, judges said the meat had tasted and smelled fine, and did not make anyone sick, but it had no certificate of origin. Because of this "legal" defect, selling it to snack bars in Hamburg, Bremen and other towns had been a fraud.