Retailers told to apologize for selling toxic drugs

Two online shop owners selling weight-loss food and drugs were ordered by a Beijing court to shut down and deliver a public apology, as the products they sold were found to contain poisonous substances.

The capital's No 4 Intermediate People's Court announced the ruling on Friday, ordering Luo Jianping and Lu Chenying to issue the apology either in a newspaper or on TV within 60 days.

The court said it will monitor where the apology appears and in which media outlet, adding the apology must also specify the time and dates the defendants sold the hazardous food and drugs online.

It was the first civil public-interest litigation regarding food and drug safety brought by prosecutors across the city after Chinese Civil Procedure Law was revised last year.

Under the law, prosecutors are given the right to initiate a civil lawsuit on behalf of the public interest when they find someone polluting the environment, harming the safety of food and drug or damaging consumers' rights.

According to the court, Luo and Lu sold more than 6,000 bags of toxic food and drugs via four online shops to several provinces, such as Beijing and Tianjin, and all the products were identified with toxic substances.

In June 2017, the city's Fengtai District People's Court sentenced Luo to three years for the crime of selling toxic and harmful food, and sentenced Lu to two years with a two-year reprieve on the same charge.

Luo was fined 300,000 yuan ($43,421) and Lu 10,000 yuan at that time.

But Ma Jun, the judge responsible for the case at the intermediate-level court, told China Daily that the money the defendants paid last year was the fine, not the civil compensation, and their sentences did not mean they could be excluded from the civil liabilities.

Ma said the significance of the civil public-interest litigation on Friday is to make more consumers know whether their rights were damaged and then help them decide whether they need the civil compensation.

"Consumers can initiate a lawsuit against the two defendants if they want to get the compensation," he said. "The lawsuit procedures will be easier for individual consumers, because the facts of the case have been clear in the public-interest litigation."