16 Arrested as Police Uncover Network of Olive Thieves Outside Madrid

Sixteen peo­ple have been arrested and another five are under inves­ti­ga­tion for steal­ing recently-har­vested olives from a farmer’s groves in the autonomous com­mu­nity of Madrid.

The arrests came after the Guardia Civil, a branch of the armed forces that acts in a polic­ing capac­ity, raided two olive mills allegedly used for trans­form­ing the stolen fruit in the Toledo and Guadalajara regions.

In a state­ment, the law enforce­ment orga­ni­za­tion said the arrested indi­vid­u­als would be charged with ​“theft, fraud and pos­ses­sion of stolen goods.”

During the raids, the Guardia Civil also seized sev­eral tanks con­tain­ing at least 6,000 liters of olive oil and doc­u­men­ta­tion of more than 17,500 kilo­grams of stolen olives.

The oper­a­tion started in January when a farmer from Brea de Tajo, south­east of Madrid, reported 8,400 kilo­grams of olives stolen.

Using infor­ma­tion obtained from secu­rity devices on the farm and five oth­ers in the area that also reported thefts, the Guardia Civil appre­hended five peo­ple trans­port­ing more than 140 kilo­grams of olives in early February. The sus­pects were detained after fail­ing to pro­vide paper­work prov­ing the ori­gin of the olives.

Widespread and well-orga­nized olive thefts have become increas­ingly com­mon in Spain as crim­i­nals take advan­tage of record-high olive oil prices.

According to Spain’s Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, olive oil prices con­tinue steadily ris­ing. Ministry data show that extra vir­gin olive oil prices at the ori­gin and vir­gin olive oil prices at the ori­gin rose again at the begin­ning of March.

Extra vir­gin olive oil is sell­ing for €528.72 per 100 kilo­grams, a slight increase com­pared to the pre­vi­ous week, 28 per­cent above the start of the crop year and nearly dou­ble what prices were two years ago.

Virgin olive oil prices – now €491.96 per 100 kilo­grams – have risen in a sim­i­lar fash­ion. Refined olive oil and lam­pante olive oil prices fell at the begin­ning of March but are also well above what they were last year and the year before.

As a result, olive grow­ers from Granada to Madrid have reported a wave of thefts this year. Along with stolen olives, thefts often result in dam­age to trees which can pre­vent them from devel­op­ing olives in the fol­low­ing crop year.

Authorities have stepped up their efforts to com­bat olive thefts in the past two years. Last year, the Guardia Civil recov­ered nearly 204,000 kilo­grams of stolen olives in the Andalusian province of Jaén, dis­man­tling two orga­nized crim­i­nal net­works.

However, agri­cul­tural asso­ci­a­tions say report­ing thefts is slow, time-con­sum­ing and rarely results in com­pen­sa­tion. Therefore, they believe the amount of theft is far higher due to many farm­ers fail­ing to report thefts.

• Guardia Civil
• Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food