B&F Meats, which had been accused by the Department of Agriculture of mislabelling horsemeat as beef of the Czech market, is back in business and yesterday said it “had not at any stage misrepresented the nature of its products”.

Traces of horse DNA have been found in beef samples taken from three meat processors in Poland – the first acknowledgement that the country could be a source of the horsemeat that fraudulently ended up in products sold as beef across Europe.