RUSSIA’S CHIEF SANITARY INSPECTOR CALLS ON MOLDOVAN AUTHORITIES TO STOP SHIPPING SLOPS
03.09.2010
Gennady Onishenko, the Head of the RosPotrebNadzor [Russian federal supervisory agency for consumer goods quality] and Russia’s Chief Federal Sanitary Inspector, has insistently called upon the Government of Moldova to restore national control of wine quality, and to stop shipping slops to Russia.
In his live interview with Echo of Moscow radio, Onishenko said he had lately [in 2010] rejected as defective over 1.2 million liters of Moldovan wines that had failed to meet quality requirements by 57 technical parameters.
He addressed to the Moldovan Government, saying “Please let to Russia only those wines that have successfully passed your national control. We have same agreed-on technical parameters with you. Ensure these parameters, and your wines will be welcome here. Moldova can and does produce goods wine varieties. This year, for instance, Russia imported 6-7 million liters of such quality wines. So, why nobody speaks about it?”
Onishenko said that after a one-year-long wine embargo in 2007, Moldova has not exported to Russia even a single liter of alcoholic beverages that failed to meet technical norms, because there existed a double quality control at that period – Moldovan and then Russian one.
The Federal Sanitary Inspector confirmed that he personally drinks “no wine, no alcohol at all. I don’t drink even water – only tea”.
Answering a listener’s question whether or not his decisions are influenced by the notorious ‘political conjuncture’, the RosPotrebNadzor chief said he had no idea what this means.
“If, say, a chromatomass spectrometer is showing that this or that indicator is forbiddingly high, what can you do? The device does not obey to any political conjuncture, does it?” said Gennady Onishenko.
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