Russia delays McDonald's suit

A Moscow court delayed hearing a case filed by the consumer-safety regulator against Oak Brook-based McDonald's Corp. for a month as the U.S. fast-food chain defended the calorie count it publishes for its food.

The watchdog, at a hearing today in the Tverskoy district court in Moscow, called for McDonald's to publicly acknowledge it had understated the caloric value of its burgers and milkshakes. McDonald's rejected the claims, which the regulator based on tests in May and June.

McDonald's has faced calls from some Russian politicians to shut down the chain as tensions between the U.S. and Russia rose over the escalating conflict in Ukraine. President Vladimir Putin struck back against U.S. and European Union sanctions last month with an import ban on some foods. Russia temporarily shut a dozen McDonald's restaurants on sanitation claims in the past four weeks, including the first outlet in the former Soviet Union, which opened in Moscow in 1990.

"McDonald's always provides its customers with trustworthy nutritional information of products, which has been confirmed by the repeated research results and reflected in the federal consumer agency conclusion," the company's Russian unit said by e-mail before the hearing began.

The company's lawyers said today they had the laboratory that carried out the consumer-safety regulator's earlier tests repeat them in July, and the results showed no violations.

The June probe found the caloric value of the burgers to be understated by as much as 70 percent and of the milkshakes by half, the regulator's Novgorod branch said on its website in July. It also claimed to find microbial contamination in some McDonald's foods.

Eight McDonald's restaurants in Russia, including the oldest and largest one near Pushkin Square in central Moscow, remain closed after Rospotrebnadzor, as the regulator is known, reported violations of sanitary rules. During the past three months, unscheduled probes by the regulator have been conducted in about 180 out of more than 440 McDonald's restaurants in Russia, according to the company.

--With assistance from Leslie Patton in Chicago.

To contact the reporter on this story: Ilya Khrennikov in Moscow at ikhrennikovbloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Kenneth Wong at kwong11bloomberg.net Torrey Clark, Paul Jarvis