SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Two former health inspectors have been indicted of usurpation bribes in sell for flitting hundreds of restaurants on food reserve exams in a city well known for the culinary scene, officials pronounced Wednesday.

In further to temptation charges, Ajamu Stewart and Clifton Sanders face transgression counts for equivocating public records, pronounced District Attorney George Gascon and City Attorney Dennis Herrera. Stewart and Sanders have pleaded not guilty and are due in justice subsequent month.

City officials pronounced Stewart, 54, and Sanders, 41, allegedly pocketed thousands of dollars by offered reserve certifications to scarcely 350 restaurants in San Francisco dating as distant behind as 2007.

Gascon pronounced the former inspectors’ intrigue showed sum negligence for state laws and disregarded the public’s trust.

“We take open crime really seriously,” Gascon said. “We wish to send a really transparent summary to people who work for our supervision that they are hold to a really tall customary and if they violate that customary and trust, there will be consequences.”

Officials contend the former inspectors for the health department‘s Food Safety Program worked in tandem over an 18-month duration and supposed bribes of in between $100 and $200 from multiform hundred grill owners and employees to give flitting grades on created food reserve exams. The restaurants operation from obvious bondage to renouned eateries charity racial fare.

Sometimes, the inspectors would administer the tests verbally and fill in the answers themselves. The examination enclosed questions on the temperatures of prohibited or cold dishes and the sanitization of food credentials areas, pronounced Richard Lee, the department’s senior manager of environmental health regulatory programs.

About 80 percent pass the test, Lee said.

The intrigue flush after a grill worker told the city’s open health dialect in late 2008, officials said, heading to a examine by the city attorney’s office.

“It is of peerless importance that the open have certainty that the employees that are questioning and controlling food reserve issues are carrying out their responsibilities with the top grade of professionalism,” pronounced Herrera, adding that many of the restaurants have given been recertified.

Rob Black, senior manager executive of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, an 800-member San Francisco-based nonprofit, pronounced his organisation helped the health dialect recertify a little grill employees through the food reserve precision classes in 2009.

“Food reserve is really critical to us and we wish to make sure when people come to restaurants in San Francisco they receive the top peculiarity food and service,” Black said. “When you have people go outward of the law, it undermines the public’s trust, as well as the reserve and peculiarity of the food, and that’s something we take really seriously.”

Gascon pronounced prosecutors motionless not to file rapist charges opposite the grill employees given it would be a formidable rapist box to infer given a little of them did not know the examination process.

“We hold the larger blame here goes to the open employees,” Gascon said. “They disregarded the law and that’s because they are being prosecuted.”

Stewart and Sanders face at slightest up to 8 years in jail and fines up to $10,000 if convicted.

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