A Spanish ship-owner with a voluminous record of skirting international laws – and who swears he has never fished illegally – has been sentenced in Spain to one year and eight months in prison for trying to unload fish caught by one of his vessels.

An Australian patrol boat spotted the Hammer, owned by Manuel Antonio Vidal Pego, fishing without authorization in protected Antarctic waters in December 2005. In an attempt to mask the source of those fish, Vidal Pego twice renamed the vessel, finally settling on Chilbo San 33 and registering the ship in North Korea. The shipment of 240 tons of Chilean sea bass was confiscated by South Korean authorities after it was sold for more than $2.7 million to Uruguay-based Coast Line S.A., an affiliate of the Spanish seafood company Freiremar.

According to the sentencing documents, Vidal Pego masked from his trade partners that he had used a boat blacklisted for having previously circumvented international regulations. Once a boat lands in a black list it is banned from fishing in protected Antarctic waters.

Vidal Pego's lawyer said in court that the charge stems from an error on the company’s import declaration and has appealed the case.  “We’re sure we will win, because we’re right,” said Foro Hernández, spokesperson for Vidal Pego, in an interview with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

The most commonly consumed fish in Spain is hake. Based on allegations of fraud in the hake market, ICIJ carried out a DNA study on hake in the Spanish market.

Last year a team of Spanish and Greek researchers at the University of Oviedo and Aristotle University of Thessaloniki published a study on high levels of apparently intentional mislabeling of hake imports in their respective countries.

Southern African hake species were mainly being marketed as European or South American Hake. European and South American hakes are worth double the amount of southern African hakes, researchers noted. Following publication, the Spanish government requested a copy of the study, but the official report did not include company names. The lead researcher Eva García Vázquez told ICIJ she would have provided the names associated with the mislabeled samples had officials asked.

The researchers also experienced complaints from industry. So when ICIJ requested the company identities, García declined to share that information. ICIJ decided to undertake its own snapshot study in Madrid –Spain’s capital– to determine if mislabeling was still occurring. ICIJ commissioned García Vázquez and her team at the University of Oviedo to conduct a second study to determine the extent of mislabeling in the fresh and frozen hake markets.  

DNA experts told ICIJ our methodology was sound and simple. Geneticist Einar Neisen from the National Institute of Aquatic Resources at the Technical University of Denmark called the work “a walk in the park” as it was easy to identify the different species. The case might have been different if ICIJ were trying to determine the geographical locations among samples of the same species.