Organised crime seems to pay quite handsomely, especially if you manage to be part of a profession that seems to be beyond reproach. That can surely be the only conclusion to draw from the group of 17 fishermen who were fined a mere £720 thousand in court today for an overfishing scam that effectively stole £63 MILLION of fish from our seas.
The case has been dragging on for many years, and uncovered a huge network designed to bypass the official systems to land illegal fish in vast quantities. This involved skippers on boats, processing factories on land, doctored weighing machines, and even secret pipes to surreptitiously siphon off the illicit fish.
The Judge described the whole operation as ‘cynical and sophisticated’, yet the sentence seems to make a mockery of the sheer scale of the crime.
The fish involved were mackerel and herring, caught by large boats in the pelagic fishing sector. These boats are the biggest and most lucrative in the UK’s fishing fleet. Ironically it is this same fishery that provides ‘sustainable’ MSC mackerel and is now embroiled in a bitter dispute with their North Atlantic neighbours over access to the fish.
This has happened before, in another fishery, at the other end of the UK. In 2009 the Stevenson family, of Newlyn, found guilty of another widespread scam to land illegal fish from their beam trawling fleet, were fined a nominal fee of £1 for each offence - despite profiting by over £4million from the fish illegally landed.
Today’s verdict is a slap in the face to all of us. Because if anyone ‘owns’ the fish in the sea – then we all do. And this was stolen from us.
But most disgusting of all is that the vast amounts of overfishing by these boats, and the puny fines received, are happening at the same time as the other end of our fishing industry – the small-scale, inshore, low-impact vessels are struggling to make ends meet. It’s no exaggeration to say that some of the local fishermen around our coasts are in danger of going to the wall over access to just a few boxes worth of quota for these fish.
It’s high time we realised there is not one homogenous ‘fishing industry’, and started supporting the progressive, low-impact end of the scale. These guys are the heart and soul of coastal communities, and yet are not being represented by a system which favours the better-organised, bigger boats.
At the moment it seems like the bigger you are, the softer you fall.
