A Dutch court on Thursday rejected a bid by a meat wholesaler to quash an order recalling 50,000 tonnes of beef potentially contaminated with horsemeat. "The court rejects the request for a preliminary injunction," on Dutch food authority NVWA's recall of meat handled by Willy Selten, judge Reinier van Zutphen said at the commercial court in The Hague. Businessman Selten, allegedly a key player in Europe's horsemeat scandal, had sought to overturn the NVWA's order to recall all meat sold by the company over the last two years.

Thousands of DNA tests on European beef products have revealed extensive food fraud across the European Union, with almost one in 20 meals marketed as beef likely to be tainted with horse, the European Commission said Tuesday. Releasing the results of more than 4,000 tests in recent weeks to detect the potential mislabelling of beef products, the EU executive said 193 products contained positive traces of horsemeat DNA, or 4.55 percent.

Lawyers representing a Dutch businessman suspected of involvement in Europe's meat scandal, asked judges on Tuesday to quash an order forcing his company to recall thousands of tonnes of beef allegedly contaminated with horsemeat. Businessman Willy Selten's lawyer called last week's order by the Dutch food and consumer watchdog to recall thousands of tonnes of meat, sold by the company over the last two years, as "bizarre and bordering on the mass hysteria gripping the whole of Europe."

Thousands of DNA tests on beef products across the European Union found the meals contained up to 5.0 percent of horsemeat, the European Commission said Tuesday. The EU on February 15 ordered 2,250 DNA tests on prepared meals said to contain beef in the wake of a horsemeat scandal that hugely undermined consumer confidence in the food industry. It also ordered tests in horse carcasses for the potentially harmful horse drug phenylbutazone, or bute, which is banned from the human food chain.