Kate Willson stories from The Center for Public Integrity

IMPACT: RTI Biologics suspends import of human tissue from Ukraine

Ukraine — 2013-04-29T14:42:20-04:00

One of the biggest players in the global trade in human tissue has suspended its partnership with suppliers in Ukraine, where authorities have carried out multiple investigations over allegations of illegal tissue recovery.

RTI Biologics, a Florida-based manufacturer of medical implants made from skin, bone and other human parts, "made a decision to voluntarily suspend import of tissues from Ukrainian institutions," the company said in a statement Thursday.

Congressional staffers and the Pentagon announced this week they were reviewing contracts the government holds with RTI and its German subsidiary Tutogen Medical. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reported in July on RTI's relationship with morgues under investigation for allegedly forging documents or bullying families into signing donor consent forms.

"We comply with comprehensive regulations, both from U.S. regulatory authorities and those of other countries, that govern each and every activity performed by tissue banks," RTI said.

Ukrainian law, like U.S. law, requires donors or their loved ones give express consent before tissue can be recovered.

The trade in human parts is a billion-dollar industry that is growing and changing so rapidly, legislation has a hard time keeping pace. It is illegal in most countries to buy or sell human parts, but companies can charge fees for handling the tissue. RTI is a publicly-traded company that warns its stockholders, "the supply of human tissue has at times limited our growth, and may not be sufficient to meet our future needs."

RTI obtains tissue from more than 30 procurement agencies in the United States as well as in places such as Ukraine. The company supplies hospitals in more than 30 countries and in all fifty states. Records show the company has offered Ukrainian tissue to hospitals in New York.

German officials had planned a September inspection of 10 Ukrainian morgues that supply Tutogen, according to Ines Schantz, a spokeswoman for the Upper Bavarian government in Germany. But the company withdrew its licenses to import tissue from Ukraine into Germany on August 20.

The German government subsequently cancelled its plans to inspect the foreign tissue agencies. "After the removal of all the institutes from the import license, there was no legal basis any longer to perform the planned inspection," Schantz said.

She said German authorities continue to investigate human tissues already imported from the Ukraine.

ICIJ's eight-month investigation revealed that Tutogen, which was acquired by RTI in early 2008, has for years relied on its Ukrainian suppliers for a significant amount of human tissue in spite of concerns raised within the company more than a decade ago and a series of subsequent investigations.

Read the rest of the story.

IMPACT: Pentagon, Congress probe tissue contracts

2012-09-06T12:12:31-04:00

The Pentagon has announced a new program to better oversee human cadaver tissue used in Defense Department hospitals around the world and is investigating allegations that some tissue-based medical implants provided to service members may have been obtained improperly, military officials said Wednesday.

At the same time, Congressional investigators say they are looking into government contracts between the Department of Veterans Affairs and RTI Biologics, a Florida-based manufacturer of medical implants made from human bones, skin, ligaments and other tissues. RTI is one of the world's largest players in the billion-dollar human tissue industry — processing a quarter of all material recovered from cadavers in the United States.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reported in July that RTI had obtained tissues from suppliers in the U.S. and the Ukraine that have been investigated for allegedly forging documents or bullying families into signing donor consent forms.

“We are currently in the process of determining if our Military Treatment Facilities — administered by the Army, Navy, and Air Force respectively — have conducted business with RTI or its subsidiary, Tutogen,” Defense spokeswoman Cynthia Smith said in a prepared statement.

Read the rest at ICIJ.org.

Traceability elusive in global trade of human parts

2012-07-19T13:05:40-04:00

The Kentucky man died in an off-road vehicle accident last year. His liver and kidneys helped save three dying patients in his home state. Musculoskeletal grafts taken from his heart, skin and bones were used in medical products used to improve the lives of 15 people around the country.

But soon after the transplants, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) learned the organ recipients had contracted hepatitis C. It turned out the Kentucky donor had a history of substance abuse and had served prison time. The tissue bank that recycled his remains, the CDC said, had screwed up the usual testing done to verify that tissues and organs were safe.

The CDC's Office of Blood, Organ, and Other Tissue Safety deployed a team of “shoe-leather epidemiologists” to track down the tissue before someone else got sick. Unlike hearts and other organs — or blood products that come with a unique barcode — there’s no easy way to track down tissue.

Instead the team found tissues one-by-one, calling hospitals and chasing down doctors. It took nearly a month to locate all the surgeons who had implanted tissue into 15 people. A child, later found to have hepatitis C, had received an infected heart vessel patch before the tissue recall began.

In some cases, inconsistent or non-existent recordkeeping prevents medical sleuths from ever finding potentially infected tissues. In one major case that played out in 2006, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and five tissue companies moved to recall 25,000 tissues taken illegally from U.S. donors without proper consent or testing. Eight hundred of the tissues shipped overseas were never found.

The trade in human tissues is virtually untraceable at a global level. Poor accountability and inadequate safeguards have prompted concerns among medical experts that products made from bone, skin, tendon and other tissues taken from the dead could spread disease to the living — putting patients who receive tissue implants in dental surgery, breast reconstruction and other procedures at risk.

Little has been done to address this problem, despite U.S. government reports that have raised red flags for the past 15 years — and despite continuing concerns by the CDC and the World Health Organization.

Body brokers leave trail of questions, corruption

2012-07-19T13:06:42-04:00

In April 2003, Robert Ambrosino murdered his ex-fiancée — a 22-year-old aspiring actress — by shooting her in the face with a .45-caliber pistol. Then he turned the gun around and killed himself.

Soon after, Ambrosino’s corpse entered the United States’ vast tissue-donation system, his skin, bones and other body parts destined for use in the manufacture of cutting-edge medical products.

But before they entered the system, Michael Mastromarino, owner of a New Jersey-based tissue recovery firm, needed to solve a couple of problems. He didn’t want to have to report that Ambrosino had perished in a murder-suicide. And he didn’t want anyone to know that Ambrosino’s family hadn’t given permission for his body to be used for tissue donation.

Mastromarino solved both problems the same way: He lied.

Mastromarino was the leader of a now-infamous human tissue trafficking ring that fed an international trade in body parts. Along with tissues from Ambrosino’s corpse, he stole parts from grandmothers, electrical engineers, and factory workers, as well as from the remains of famed journalist Alistair Cooke.

The disgraced dental surgeon from Brooklyn supplied the raw material for products used for a host of surgical operations — from knee repair to plastic surgery and cosmetic implants. He was a ground-level player in an industry that makes its profits by harvesting human tissues mostly from the United States, but also from Slovakia, Estonia, Mexico, and other countries around the world. One of Mastromarino's top buyers was Florida-headquartered RTI Biologics, a processor of American, Canadian and Ukrainian body parts that trades among the high-tech companies on the NASDAQ stock exchange.

Years after Mastromarino was sent to prison and the publicity in his case quieted down, his story has been given new life by a lawsuit filed in a Staten Island courthouse. New York Supreme Court Judge Joseph J. Maltese has given the green light for RTI to stand trial Oct. 22 in a civil case that will delve into what the company knew — or should have known — about Mastromarino’s body snatching.

Human corpses are prize in global drive for profits

2013-04-29T14:42:17-04:00

On Feb. 24, Ukrainian authorities made an alarming discovery: bones and other human tissues crammed into coolers in a grimy white minibus.

Investigators grew even more intrigued when they found, amid the body parts, envelopes stuffed with cash and autopsy results written in English.

What the security service had disrupted was not the work of a serial killer but part of an international pipeline of ingredients for medical and dental products that are routinely implanted into people around the world.

The seized documents suggested that the remains of dead Ukrainians were destined for a factory in Germany belonging to the subsidiary of a U.S. medical products company, Florida-based RTI Biologics.

RTI is one of a growing industry of companies that make profits by turning mortal remains into everything from dental implants to bladder slings to wrinkle cures.

The industry has flourished even as its practices have roused concerns about how tissues are obtained and how well grieving families and transplant patients are informed about the realities and risks of the business.

In the U.S. alone, the biggest market and the biggest supplier, an estimated two million products derived from human tissue are sold each year, a figure that has doubled over the past decade.

It is an industry that promotes treatments and products that literally allow the blind to see (through cornea transplants) and the lame to walk (by recycling tendons and ligaments for use in knee repairs). It's also an industry fueled by powerful appetites for bottom-line profits and fresh human bodies.

Read this ICIJ investigation.

Fishing nations approve overhaul of bluefin tuna tracking system

2012-01-23T20:20:51-05:00

Nearly 50 countries that trade in high-priced Eastern Atlantic Bluefin Tuna agreed Saturday to transform an archaic paper-based method for tracking fish into a digitalized system that officials say will make it harder for fleets to smuggle plundered bluefin into market.

Member countries of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), the body charged with protecting the bluefin stocks threatened by overfishing, will implement the new electronic system by the time ships set out in the spring of 2013.

Last year, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) exposed the paper-based Bluefin Catch Document scheme as so full of holes as to render it virtually useless. The system was riddled with inaccuracies and inconsistencies and did little to stop the thriving black market in bluefin. Before the ICIJ report, officials had lauded the system as a successful deterrent to illegal trade — a way to track every fish from hook, through fattening farms and to the final buyer.

Bluefin tuna is one of the sea’s most valuable species, a highly migratory fish that can weigh more than 500 kilograms (more than 1,102 pounds) and live 40 years. One large fish can fetch more than $100,000 in Japan, which consumes around 80 percent of the global bluefin market. The fish has been widely hunted in the Mediterranean. As a result, the spawning stock has plummeted by nearly 75 percent over the past five decades.

Behind the demise of bluefin, the ICIJ investigation found a decade-long history of rampant fraud and a lack of official oversight. At its peak —between 1998 and 2007 — the bluefin black market was worth $4 billion, with more than one of every three fish caught illegally.

Alarmed at the rate of the bluefin’s decline, ICCAT regulators came up with a paper-based reporting system in 2008 designed to help them better track the trade.

Fishermen, sea ranchers and importers filled out paper documents and submitted them to ICCAT's office in Madrid, where staff manually entered them into a database. The time lapse between trade and data entry, as well as forms only partially completed, meant officials would have been unable to accurately track the trade

In 2010, ICIJ gained access to the bluefin-tracking database through an ICCAT member country. ICIJ's analysis of the data showed that most catches lacked crucial information that regulators need to follow the fish from vessel to market.

The problems were most prolific at tuna “ranches” where the fish are fattened for months before being killed and sent to Japan. Because everything happens under water, it is nearly impossible to keep track of the fish. For example, the data analysis showed that ranches were selling more bluefin than they had reported buying in the first place. And 20 percent of the fish killed lacked any export information, effectively turning those fish into ghost tuna that regulators could not track to a final destination. One of ICCAT’s own scientists quoted in the ICIJ story called the paper-based tracking system “a bloody mess.”

Regulators say that the new electronic system will add real time monitoring and better enforcement to the trade as well as a more accurate account of how many bluefin are caught and traded. Monica Allen, a spokesperson for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said the digitalized tracking system will "help detect fraud and deter IUU [Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated] fishing."

‘Pirate’ fleet owner convicted of fish fraud

2011-11-18T07:45:10-05:00

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.

In October ICIJ detailed how Vidal Pego, his companies and affiliates have been repeatedly pursued by government agencies and international regulators for their role in a decade-old network of vessels that entered remote and protected waters of the Antarctic and targeted toothfish – also known as Chilean sea bass – in violation of an international convention.

Since 1999, international fisheries regulators have linked vessels owned by Vidal Armadores – a company owned by Vidal Pego and his father – or its affiliates to more than 40 cases of alleged illegal fishing, ranging from using banned fishing gear to targeting protected kitefish shark.

Trafficking in fish is a thriving global black market. It fuels organized crime and the rapid disappearance of the oceans’ most valuable species.

Many officials claim that in this trade Vidal Pego has been one of its most infamous players.

Before this conviction, countries from Mozambique to the U.S. had fined the company or its affiliates five times for a total of more than $5 million. Vidal Armadores or its affiliates have landed in court seven times in criminal or administrative cases related to alleged illegal fishing. Vidal Pego pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in a U.S. federal court in a 2006 case involving an illegal importation of toothfish by a Vidal Armadores affiliate.

But Vidal Pego still has never been found guilty in a criminal court of fishing illegally. That includes the current case.

Despite Vidal Armadores' record, Spain and the EU have granted at least €8.2 million ($12 million) in subsidies to the family’s companies since the mid-1990s, the ICIJ investigation showed.

Hake hoax in Spanish markets

Spain — 2012-01-24T20:58:12-05:00

Consumers in Spain trust the mild-flavored white flesh of hake, the most popular fish in a country that eats more seafood than almost any other in Europe. Hake is considered safe for pregnant women, and kids crunch into the cod-like fillets as fishsticks.

“There’s trust because of the cultural bond,” said Cristina San Martín, head of quality and food safety at Fedepesca, a trade group representing Spanish fish retailers. “You see it from the time you’re a kid, and it also has a good price.”

What Spaniards probably don’t know is that the fish they take home for dinner might not be hake at all.

The Spanish public is being cheated by a seemingly pervasive and dangerous form of commercial fraud: Different species — including cheaper fish such as catfish from Vietnam and grenadier from the Pacific Ocean — are sold as hake in markets across Madrid. A DNA study commissioned by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists found in July that nearly one in 10 fish were mislabeled. A study completed last year by the same scientists found mislabeling in nearly 40 percent of samples.

“Some of the revealed cases are really ‘cheeky’ and shockingly blunt attempts to fool consumers,” said the European Commission’s top fisheries DNA expert Jann Th. Martinsohn, who reviewed ICIJ’s methodology and findings. “And worse, they are not unique.”

Hake is big business in Spain, where sales exceed €1 billion a year. Mislabeling could bump the bottom line of companies that pass off cheap fish as higher-quality fillets, and may even mask illegal fishing, marine biologists and economists say. The European Union has strict regulations requiring that a paper trail follow fish from ship to shop. But the law doesn’t require that inspectors implement DNA testing to verify accurate labeling.

“The majority [of mislabeling] is commercial fraud,” said Ricardo Pérez, DNA expert and investigator of the Spanish National Research Council. “In recent years there’s been an increase of it, I think because companies know they’re not being watched.”

Mislabeling seafood is a global phenomenon. The environmental group Oceana reported in May that studies in different countries around the world found between 25 to 70 percent of the fish being mislabeled. In the United States, tilapia was sold as red snapper. In South Africa, mackerel was sold as barracuda. In New Zealand, protected hammerhead shark was sold as lemon shark.

Europe’s top department store El Corte Inglés pulled a batch of more than a ton of mislabeled fish from its shelves when told of ICIJ’s findings. The majority of markets that carried mislabeled fish attributed the problem to human error. And every one of the eight shops where ICIJ found mislabeled samples said it was a one-time occurrence. Authorities in Spain seemed to agree. They said they didn’t think the results of ICIJ’s study were significant enough to show a trend, or present a major threat to the public.

Almost half Spain’s consumers buy their food in or near Madrid. Yet in 2010, regional and city authorities taxed with controlling consumer goods used scientific testing to identify fish species of 59 samples — about a third the number included in the ICIJ study. One thing appears clear: Consumers are largely ignored in the equation.

“What they [authorities] answer, is, ‘will somebody die? No. Well, then it’s only money,’” said Gemma Trigueros, nutritional coordinator at the Spanish Consumers and Users Association (OCU).

What’s on your plate?

Hake is found across the globe — from Argentina and Namibia, to Ireland and New Zealand — and there are at least 12 distinct species of hake in all. Some, like southern African hakes, are cheap. Others, like European hakes, return a higher profit.

Spain imports more than 60 percent of the hake coming to the EU. So scientists at the University of Oviedo in Spain partnered with a Greek university and last December published findings of a multi-year study. Their results showed that more than one in three hake products sold in Spain and Greece were not what they appeared. Researchers identified a trend: Cheap species were sold as higher-priced European or American hake, leading scientists to deduce that companies were committing fraud.

Eva García Vázquez, the primary author, did not publish company names in her report and declined to share those with ICIJ, although she said she would have given the information to the government, had officials asked.

So ICIJ undertook a sampling in Madrid to find out if the mislabeling continued and what companies were involved. In June, reporters collected 150 hake samples from major supermarkets, fishmongers and bulk suppliers. ICIJ commissioned the experts at the University of Oviedo to conduct a blind DNA analysis of those products.

DNA testing is better known for its use in forensic analysis, publicized on TV programs like CSI. Yet the tests are today fairly simple, cheap and quick. And they have a wide range of uses. Thanks to an enzyme-based technique developed in the 1980s, scientists can obtain the DNA sequence from a fish and, by matching it to an online database, identify the species in just one day.

ICIJ’s analysis showed that 8.6 percent of samples were mislabeled. The researchers concluded that the actual level of mislabeling is likely much higher than what ICIJ’s snapshot study has documented.

'Surely Deliberate'

The most worrisome findings involved entirely different families of fish being sold as hake. Long-bodied Patagonian grenadier from the southern ocean, bulbous-eyed Pacific grenadier found off the coast off of California, and striped catfish pulled from rivers in Vietnam look nothing alike when they’re swimming. Yet as a frozen fillet, most shoppers just see white fish.

But the fish dealers can tell.

“They don’t even look alike,” said Gonzalo González, a fishmonger whose family has been selling fish since the 1920s and is president of Fedepesca. “Some are whiter than others — like detergent commercials say.”

This helped experts at the University of Oviedo conclude that swapping species was “surely deliberate.”

When alerted to the ICIJ findings, El Corte Inglés, Europe’s largest department store, took immediate action to independently verify the problem. The high-end market said it conducted its own DNA analysis of seven batches of the mislabeled product and found that the samples from one shipment of 1.4 metric tons were also mislabeled.

“We’ve withdrawn that entire batch from our shops,” said a spokesperson for the store. “We’re in conversations with the provider to take drastic measures.” She declined to share the provider’s identity for “confidentiality reasons,” and said El Corte Inglés has started to carry out genetic testing of fish as part of its routine quality controls.

ICIJ also encountered problems with products sold in top supermarket Alcampo from Spain’s leading fish exporter, Freiremar. Two products of its brand Nakar were mislabeled — one was a different species of hake, the other was a Pacific Ocean grenadier. Freiremar said it doesn’t regularly conduct genetic analysis “unless there’s a well-founded suspicion.” Freiremar asked the supermarket to withdraw the products identified by ICIJ’s study as Pacific grenadier “as a precautionary approach.”

All the experts who weighed in on the study said the most egregious finding was the case of Vietnamese striped catfish sold as hake by a local fishmonger, Pescados El Bierzo. This river species is criticized for higher contamination levels and lower nutritional value than other fish.

The shop is housed in a market serving immigrants in Madrid’s city center. Its manager Vicente — who declined to give his last name — said ICIJ caught a one-time error, not a widespread practice. He said various types of bulk frozen fillets are separated only by plastic sheet. The mislabeling likely occurred by a “fillet of catfish jumping into the hake area.”

Health at stake

Researchers at the University of Oviedo warned that cases where a different fish than expected is sold could cause “severe health problems to unaware consumers.”

Allergist Dr. Beatriz Rodríguez of Madrid’s Getafe University Hospital said that while normally people are allergic to fish generally, it’s increasingly common to develop sensitivity to one particular species group — like catfish. Kids are the most vulnerable.

“If I tell the mother: avoid catfish and then she buys hake thinking she’s safe, the child could have a severe allergic reaction,” she said, causing hives, diarrhea or even problems breathing.

In Hong Kong, more than 600 people became violently ill in 2007 after eating what they thought was “Atlantic cod” — and turned out to be poisonous oilfish, named for the indigestible wax esters in its flesh.

Scientists warn of other health risks with fish mislabeling: pollutants, toxins and other harmful substances like mercury specific to geographic regions or species. Health officials in the EU and Spain said there are currently no health alerts caused by fish mislabeling.

National fish sells

Sergio Sánchez manages Pescados y Congelados Conchi, a bulk foreign fish shop where both of ICIJ’s hake purchases were mislabeled. He said when he buys fish for his shop, he cares about the best-by date and appearance. He said some consumers turn up their noses when told the truth about the origin of fish.

“National species sell. You tell people that hake is from Chile and they don’t want it,”

Sánchez said. “You tell them shrimp is from China — and not from Huelva [in southern Spain] — and same thing.”

Supermarket chains Alcampo, Hipercor, Eroski and Carrefour each blamed a one-time error by an employee. All the markets said they adhere to strict quality controls. Carrefour said it “last year … rejected 188,909 kg (for not being correctly labeled or because they did not meet minimum size requirements).”

In the cases where more expensive European hake was billed as cheaper hake species, Alcampo said the consumer wins. “We were giving the client a product of higher quality than what the label said,” the company wrote in an email response.

Stefano Mariani of the University College in Dublin, thinks cases like this may point to another problem: overfishing. When a boat reaches its quota, it must stop targeting that type of fish. But any additional catch could be laundered into the legal market as a different fillet, Mariani reported in a study published earlier this year.

“Would you accept getting pig meat when you buy beef? Absolutely not,” he said. In a tightly controlled market like the EU he finds the problem alarming.

European hakes are subject to strict catch limits under recovery plans, a result of decades of overfishing. Meanwhile fishmongers have been complaining about the low prices they’re getting for the fish, which leads some vendors to conclude that fishermen aren’t adhering to the quotas. The Ministry of Environment, Agriculture and Fisheries denied Spanish vessels are exceeding hake quotas .

Law and disorder

EU law requires a label follow the fish from net or farm to the final vendor.

The Health and Fisheries ministries are required to verify that imports are really what they appear. The latter is also taxed with inspecting fish landed at Spanish ports. The Fisheries ministry did not provide the number of inspectors, although it said more than 200 people were involved in their entire control operations.

Neither ministry would comment on ICIJ’s findings, saying they could not “draw general conclusions.” They did not respond to questions regarding the earlier multi-year study by the University of Oviedo.

No EU law requires member countries to conduct DNA testing to find out if labels and products match. And most — including Spain — largely do not employ such testing.

Several authorities share control of tracking fish, safety and labeling in Spain. The fractured oversight allows individual authorities to shrug off blame. Regional governments oversee supermarkets, restaurants and factories. The Madrid regional and city governments administer products for a region comprised of more than 7 million people and the world’s second-largest fish market.

Yet officials there scientifically tested just 59 fish to verify the species in 2010. José Manuel Torrecilla, manager of the health authority in the city of Madrid, acknowledged they do very few tests on fish identification, but said the city plans to increase the number in coming years.

“It’s more important what causes a health risk to consumers: contaminants in fish and its freshness,” he said, pointing out that the city labs conducted about 500 tests for freshness and contaminants in 2010.

Scientist Ricardo Pérez has been conducting DNA analysis of fish for more than two decades. He said he feels frustrated because regional governments just aren’t interested in what he offers. “There’s no money for that,” they tell him.

“You develop interesting tools for governments to improve control, and it’s almost impossible to get them to do something,” he said.

The EU Commission research center recently published a study showing how scientific techniques such as DNA testing are vital to fight illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing. Co-author Jann Th. Martinsohn told ICIJ the cost of scientific testing is no longer prohibitive — it can be as low as €35 per sample if you test in bulk.

Martinsohn has spoken to officials across the EU, pushing governments to implement the kind of testing that private industry has been doing for years. Spanish officials told him the Fisheries ministry only does sporadic DNA testing, while the industry group Anfaco has its own private laboratory.

Carlos Ruiz, technical and policy coordinator of Anfaco, told ICIJ its lab conducts 47,000 tests a year — about 1,000 of them being DNA analysis of the species. But they don’t share results with the government unless it’s a commissioned job paid for by officials. And those are rare.

“This is a private lab,” Ruiz said. “We’re not watchdogs of the market.”

Martinsohn lists Denmark as one of the most advanced countries in the EU on the use of DNA analysis in fisheries enforcement. The Danish Fisheries Inspectorate collaborates with the public university to conduct the testing. Inspectors there carry small toolboxes to obtain tissue.

Pérez, the Spanish researcher so frustrated with government’s disinterest, is taking his research a step further. He’s developing a test kit akin to a pregnancy test so inspectors can verify the species within minutes. But he said if governments don’t take the lead, he encourages consumers to speak up.

“I hope that if there are complaints, agencies will start answering them,” he said. “If companies know they’re not being monitored, what they’re going to do is try to make more money.”

Top fisheries official says EU is investigating illegalities by Spanish companies

2012-01-23T20:20:51-05:00

The European Union’s top fisheries official, Commissioner Maria Damanaki, said her office is investigating Spanish shipowners’ involvement in illegal fishing and possible misappropriations of EU funding. The announcement comes in the wake of articles published Sunday by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The stories detailed how billions of euros in subsidies support Spanish companies that have violated fishing laws.

One of the stories focused on a family-controlled firm in northwestern Spain, Vidal Armadores, which received at least €8.2 million in subsidies while it faced more than 40 allegations of illegal fishing.

“The serious allegations are already under investigation by the European Commission and being followed up with the Spanish national authorities,” Damanaki said in a press release. “We are establishing all facts in order to pursue breaches.”

Meanwhile the leading lobbyist for the Spanish fishing sector told the Spanish daily newspaper El Mundo that ICIJ’s analysis showing the industry received nearly €6 billion since 2000 “does not reflect reality.” Javier Garat said the industry will only get about €4.5 billion between 2000-2013. But his figures only included direct subsidies from the European Union. ICIJ’s analysis of the subsidies included other important forms of public aid such as tax breaks or subsidized fishing rights in foreign waters. ICIJ did not base its calculation on estimates. Reporters analyzed thousands of pages of data on money already paid to the industry.

Two more stories in the series will be published tomorrow and Thursday. The ICIJ stories have so-far been re-published or cited by outlets around the world, including The Sunday Times, El País, El Mundo, The New York Times, EU Observer, Huffington Post and the BBC.

Nearly €6 billion in subsidies fuel Spain’s ravenous fleet

Spain — 2013-01-23T14:43:01-05:00

Decades of overfishing have left Europe’s fish stocks in peril and its fishermen in poverty. It’s an impasse paid for by EU taxpayers. Yet a proposed revision of the EU’s fishing law, hailed as sweeping reform, is rapidly losing momentum.

A look at the industry’s biggest player — Spain — shows what officials are up against. Billions of euros in subsidies built its bloated fleet and propped up a money-losing industry. All the while companies systematically flout the rules while officials overlook fraud and continue to fund offenders, an investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has found.

“Spain has earned its bad reputation,” said Ernesto Penas Lado, director of policy and enforcement at the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries. “The problem is others don’t have the reputation and deserve it just as much.”

Spain may not be alone. But as the EU’s most powerful fishing fleet, it is the starkest example of a failed EU policy, critics say.

The Spanish fishing industry has received more than €5.8 billion (more than $8 billion) in subsidies since 2000 for everything from building new vessels and breaking down old ships to payments for retiring fishermen and training for the next generation, an unprecedented analysis by ICIJ shows. Subsidies account for almost a third of the value of the industry. Simply put, nearly one in three fish caught on a Spanish hook or raised in a Spanish farm is paid for with public money.

ICIJ’s analysis is the first in-depth look at just how much public aid Spain has received for fishing — primarily from EU taxpayers, but also from Madrid and regional governments. The country has cornered a third of all the EU’s fishing aid since 2000, far more than any other member state. The central government doles out even more for things such as low interest loans and funding for its largest industry associations, which in turn lobby the EU for more industry subsidies, records show. Since 2000, the sector has avoided paying €2 billion ($2.7 billion) in taxes on fuel to the Spanish Treasury.

Public monies also fund a surprising range of services. More than €82 million ($114 million) has been spent to promote the fishing sector through advertising and at trade shows. After fishing vessels were hijacked by pirates in the Indian Ocean, Spain in 2009 changed its law to allow vessels to hire private security forces onboard, and then it helped foot the bill to the tune of €2.8 million.

The root of the problem, regulators say, is that out-of-control subsidies encourage countries to build up already oversized fleets that are rapidly depleting the seas.

“Fish are not an unlimited resource,” said fisheries economist Andrew Dyck of the University of British Columbia. “When the public purse is the only thing propping this industry up, we are paying for resource degradation.”

The European Commission itself recently concluded that “too many boats continue to chase too few fish.” It blamed the situation, in large part, on subsidies.

Fish, not human rights

One of the most controversial forms of public aid pays for foreign fishing licenses. With its own waters increasingly empty of fish, the EU buys rights to the fishing grounds of developing countries such as Morocco, Mozambique and the Ivory Coast.

Green groups, fishing experts and some EU politicians have criticized the agreements, saying European fishermen take advantage of poor countries that often lack knowledge and resources to protect their fish stocks. And key agreements cost more than they return on the value of fish; that is the case with Morocco, where each euro invested returns only €0.65 in value added, according to a study funded by the EU.

The Spanish industry has received more than €800 million ($1.15 billion) in foreign licenses over the past decade — about two-thirds of the EU licenses overall, according to the ICIJ analysis.

The agreements have the support of Carmen Fraga Estévez, the EU Parliament’s most powerful legislator on fisheries issues. A sharp-tongued politician with an encyclopedic knowledge of the industry, Fraga served as fishing secretary in Spain and has held a seat in the Parliament’s committee on fisheries — which she now chairs — for 17 years. Her loyalty to the industry appears to be so deep that when she had to choose between human rights and fish, she voted for the latter.

“The Fisheries Committee has to discuss fisheries issues, not human rights,” she was quoted in the press as saying when in 2009 the committee for the first time voted down a fishing agreement. Days before the vote, 157 civilians died after Guinea’s totalitarian regime opened fire on pro-democracy protesters. The agreement would have handed the Guinean government €450,000 ($639,000) a year for fishing licenses.

Fraga Estévez declined requests for interviews from ICIJ.

Spanish member of the European Parliament (MEP) Josefa Andrés Barea said the subsidized foreign fishing licenses are vital. When Spain entered the EU in 1986, very few Spanish vessels were allowed in the Union’s waters. So fishing in foreign waters was — and still is — the only way for many ship owners to make a living. And if Spain isn’t fishing, she said, less savory global players will scoop up the catch instead.

"There's a fundamental problem here which is that major [fishing] powers like China will be there if we're not. And they don't have any rules,” Andrés said. “They're much more predatory than we are."

Fewer fish, poorer fishermen

EU waters are among the world’s most exploited. Scientists say three quarters of assessed fish stocks are overfished. Eels once served as a delicacy are so depleted scientists doubt they can recover despite a Europe-wide rescue plan. Irish Sea Cod, Baltic Sprat and West of Scotland herring are all on the downfall.

The trend stretches across the globe. In 2006, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that 75 percent of the world fish stocks were fished to the very limit of — or beyond — sustainable levels. In its latest report, from last year, that figure had risen to 85 percent.

“Europe has a long and dark history of overfishing,” said Boris Worm, one of the world´s most renowned marine biologists, working at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada. In a 2003 study, Worm showed that industrialized fishing has, since 1950, emptied the oceans of nine out of 10 fish longer than 20 inches such as salmon, cod and halibut.

Fewer fish mean fewer — and poorer — fishermen. Across the EU, the sector often costs taxpayers more than it produces. According to a recent report by the environmental group Oceana, at least eight countries received more money in public aid in 2009 than the value of their landed fish.

The fishing industry was the only segment of Spain’s economy that shrunk in the 2000s. The northwestern region of Galicia more than anywhere else in Europe relies on the industry — and the subsidies — to stay afloat. Yet the area lost a third of its fisheries-related jobs in the decade leading up to 2006.

In the Galician port of Vigo on the Atlantic coast, more fish pass across the docks headed for consumers’ plates than in any other port in the world. Coastal towns are riddled with signs boasting subsidized fishing projects. Politicians include the sector as a central theme in their campaigns.

The industry’s power was propelled by the 1960s push for industrialization by the fascist Franco regime. Franco himself was an avid fisherman and a Galician by birth.

“Economically the [fishing] industry is between the tomato and the potato. But politically it is more important than any other industry,” said EU’s head of fisheries control Valérie Lainé. The sector “has always been protected by the government — without the industry, Vigo would be dead, Galicia would be dead.”

The powerful Galician industry group ARVI, which boasts of its close ties to lawmakers, acknowledged that fishing wouldn’t be viable without public funding. In a recent position paper, it encouraged politicians to support subsidies to modernize outdated vessels, fish in foreign waters and build new on-shore cold storage.

Meanwhile subsidies steadily flow to the region, but sometimes only make things worse.

Víctor Muñiz has relied on fishing for decades. He used to own vessels, as did his father before him. Not anymore. Now they operate a fish processing plant in the Galician town of Meaño. The factory was renovated in 2009 with EU subsidies to process and freeze up to 300 tons of fish per hour; it was expected to employ 100 people. But the brand new machinery stands silent.

“There should be 10 trucks with mackerel here,” Muñiz said in a bitter tone as he walked through the 8,000 square meter plant in April. But within 20 days of the start of the season, most vessels had already scooped up their entire mackerel quota.

Muñiz said the quota is too low, but his major frustration is that too many factories like his were subsidized in the first place.

“You present a €2 million project, and they give you 60 percent. You’ve told them how much fish you're going to produce and what kind. Somebody should have told the processing plants: ‘No, sorry, this is the quota for mackerel.’”

Policy in Shambles

By 2006 it was clear that EU’s fishing policy was in shambles. Fleets were bloated. Stocks were crashing.

Researchers commissioned by the EU drafted a series of reviews of the community’s fisheries law — the Common Fisheries Policy, which will govern the fleet for at least a decade. One little-known document is informally called the “Frankenstein report” because of its damning conclusions. It lays the blame squarely on influence-driven subsidies: The sector would be broke without them.

Swedish Green Party MEP Isabella Lövin said the key problem of the EU fisheries policy is that it was “modeled after agricultural policy. You provide fertilizer and farming equipment, you get more vegetables. So they used the same model in fishing — you increase the number of boats, you get more fish. But it doesn’t work that way,” she said. “You end up with less fish.”

Subsidies over the past decades built a bloated EU fleet that plundered fish stocks. Efforts to reduce the capacity have focused on paying companies to break down old vessels. But that reduction has been undercut by subsidies given to modernize existing vessels, enabling them to catch more and more fish.

According to the 394-page “Frankenstein report”, EU-countries need to cut capacity in half and severely restrict — and adhere to — quotas for fish stocks to recover.

But Spanish Fishing Secretary Alicia Villauriz said policymakers must consider more than capacity. “You cannot make a statement saying: If you reduce the fleet everything will be more profitable. You'll also destroy a lot of employment.” Any transition, she said, would need to happen slowly.

That the European fleet was bloated was nothing new — calls to cut it down began in the 1980s. But the aid kept rolling in to build new ships and modernize old ones. “The sector has managed to attract more financial resources than would be justified under normal conditions,” the “Frankenstein” report said.

The EU researchers also found that groups set up to advise the Commission on a new fishing policy — largely made up of industry representatives — consider the platform “mainly as a channel for political influence, and secondly as a forum for discussion” of the new law.

In short: They were lobbying for their interests instead of trying to find solutions.

The EU-commissioned “Frankenstein” report concluded that EU policy did “not provide the right incentives for responsible fishing, or may even induce irresponsible fishing.”

Turning a blind eye

Protected stocks worth as much as $23 billon (€16.7 billion) are illegally traded worldwide every year — making the black market in fish more valuable than smuggling stolen art. Many of the players in the illicit trade set up shell companies in places that do not adhere to international conventions protecting the oceans.

Spanish nationals register more vessels to “flag-of-convenience” countries than any other besides Panama, Honduras and Taiwan — which are themselves considered nations where a ship-owner can register its boats without having to adhere to strict tax or safety requirements, and can operate without oversight.

It is rare for the Commission to take a member state to court. The EU Court of Justice — Europe’s highest court — has found Spain guilty three times of failing to implement EU fishing laws. Spain has refused to enforce catch limits, police its fleet or impose adequate punishment, the court ruled.

One of Spain’s most widely criticized shortfalls is policing its port of Las Palmas on the Canary Islands off the Moroccan coast. Illegal shipments of fish plundered from West African waters regularly filter into the EU through the port, according to multiple investigative reports.

Fishing Secretary Villauriz said control in Spain is expensive because of the sheer size of its industry — more than 10,000 fishing boats, 3,084 miles of coastline and 47 major ports. “But that doesn't mean we're not taking care of our obligations in control matters” she added.

The Spanish Ministry of Environment, Agriculture and Fisheries told ICIJ that inspections have nearly doubled since 2004 to 9,323 in 2010. That’s still far from the number of inspections other countries are carrying out — the United Kingdom logged nearly 50,000 inspections in 2004.

But some things don’t appear to have changed. The number of inspectors in the port of Vigo — Europe's largest fishing port — remains the same as in 2003, when EU officials blasted Spain for the measly number of national inspectors at its ports. Today four inspectors oversee more than 700,000 metric tons of fish a year — that’s nearly 20,000 kilos of fish per inspector for every hour of every day of the year, including Christmas.

Subsidized offenders

Spanish officials, like those in many other EU countries, do not take into account whether its nationals have been involved in the illegal fishing trade before doling out public aid.

Neither Spain nor the EU will make public information about offenders who have been fined for illegal fishing — also called Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated fishing (IUU). But a sliver of insight can been gleaned from a database of appellate court rulings. ICIJ reviewed every court case adjudicated since 2000 in which subsidized companies unsuccessfully appealed fines imposed by the Spanish government. In more than 80 percent of cases in which the appellant could be identified, firms continued to receive subsidies after the court had upheld penalties, the analysis shows.

There’s only one case in which the ministry of fisheries tried to prevent a company from receiving subsidies, according to ministry officials.

That Spanish ship-owner so exemplifies the quagmire as to make it a near cliché. Government officials and international regulators have repeatedly targeted Vidal Armadores for its alleged involvement in a decade-old international network of pirate fishing vessels, court and law enforcement records show. Brussels demanded multiple times that Spain recover subsidies and “take action against” Vidal Armadores. At least through 2010, however, Spain and the EU continued to pay the firm — at least €8.2 million ($12 million) since 1996. Last year the government finally fined the company and cut off aid, but the case is pending appeal.

In an interview with ICIJ, one of the firm owners, Manuel Antonio Vidal Pego, denied allegations of illegal fishing and said the company was entitled to the subsidies it received.

Like Vidal Armadores has in the past, seafood giant Pescanova targets Patagonian toothfish — sold in the U.S. as Chilean sea bass. Unlike Vidal Armadores, Pescanova is a member of an association that fights illegal fishing. In Spain, it boasts a trusted motto: “Lo bueno sale bien,” translated as “Good things go well.” But the company has its own troubles.

Last year Pescanova’s U.S. subsidiary pleaded guilty to illegally importing $1.2 million worth of toothfish. While that case — nicknamed “Operation Toothless” — was pending, the U.S. Department of Justice launched a second investigation into another allegedly illegal importation. The status of the second investigation is unknown.

Pescanova is one of the Europe’s three largest seafood companies, with a fleet of around 100 boats fishing worldwide and annual sales of €1.53 billion (more than $2 billion). Yet, since 1995 the company has pulled in more than €175 million ($250 million) in subsidies, according to the ICIJ analysis.

Pescanova repeatedly declined requests for interviews from ICIJ. “We've had 50 years of positive history,” said spokesman Angel Matamoro during a brief phone exchange. “I don't think you're asking about themes that will promote our image.”

Regarding the U.S. investigations, he said, “Whatever we had to say, we said it to the U.S. court. The company follows scrupulously the law in every country it’s in.”

Another firm that broke the law and continued to receive aid is Albacora, one of the largest tuna companies in Europe. The company’s boat Albacora Uno last year was fined $5 million — the largest fine in U.S. history — for illegally placing fishing gear in U.S. waters multiple times during a two-year period. The boat was built with subsidies and used subsidized fishing licenses. And even after the U.S. fined the firm, Spain granted Albacora €1.8 million ($2.6 million) worth of subsidies to fish in foreign waters.

The Spanish ministry of fisheries told ICIJ it had fined Albacora but will not deny the company further aid.

Albacora director Jon Uria said the 67 infringements were an “isolated” incident. The company was unaware of the infractions, he said, until the U.S. government alerted executives. In his view, the fine was disproportionate to the offense.

A Radical Reform?

Javier Garat is the Spanish industry’s most visible and eloquent lobbyist. He was born into the family that cofounded Albacora. Garat is now a shareholder of the company, but he says that doesn’t influence his lobbying.

In his meetings with officials, he often requests subsidies for the sector. “That money has generated wealth,” he said. “It’s been used to modernize an obsolete fishing sector” so that today “we have better, more modern, more secure vessels.”

Garat heads Spain’s powerful lobbying group Cepesca as well as the Europe-wide industry group Europêche — both of which operate with EU subsidies. In the halls of the ministry of fisheries in Madrid, the word is that Garat will be appointed Spain’s next fishing secretary.

Following closed-door meetings at the ministry in April, Garat and Spanish Minister of Environment, Agriculture and Fisheries Rosa Aguilar announced that the ministry and Cepesca were devising a “common roadmap to defend Spanish interests” in the overhaul of the EU fishing policy.

After two years of deliberation, the European Commission presented its proposed legislation in July. No one but the Commissioner herself appears satisfied with the draft. But the negotiations have just begun. Political alliances and lobbying will determine the final language to be voted upon before the law goes into effect January 1, 2013.

Garat called the reform draft “cowardly.” He said the Commission succumbed to pressure from environmentalists and biased media “without taking into consideration the repercussions on the fishing sector.” In his view, the state of the fish stocks is not as “catastrophic” as Commission officials appear to believe.

Yet it seems the industry’s efforts have staved off its worst nightmares.

Nothing came of ambitions to make overfishing a crime, as happened in the U.S. under the Magnuson-Stevens Act, or to require quotas be consistent with what scientists say is biologically sustainable. There was no proposal on how to limit the oversized fishing fleet or to implement quotas in the fishing agreements with foreign countries.

EU’s top fisheries official Commissioner Maria Damanaki told ICIJ her proposal is “radical.” She said Brussels will stop directly subsidizing the industry. “Now we are going to give money in a very prudent way and under very strict conditions,” she said. “And we are going to ask for paybacks in the case of illegal fishing.”

Damanaki also highlighted proposed changes in the fishing partnership agreements. “We are going to call them sustainable fisheries agreements because we're going to fish only for the surplus — if there is any surplus,” she said. “Also, we're going to respect human rights in these areas.”

Given the hype, Green party MEP Lövin said, “I had expected a clause on human rights.” But the human rights clause originally in the legislative text was missing from the final proposal.

Lövin ran for office on a ticket pledging to change the fishing policy. She said the proposal is a lot less radical than she had hoped — especially as the coming negotiations will water it down even more. “The law can´t allow for politicians to compromise with the environment when long-term environmental goals clash with short-term profit,” she said.

Ernesto Penas Lado, director of the European Commission’s fisheries policy unit, said the mindset in Spain and among fishing nations globally is that no single country feels responsible for the fate of the fish in the sea.

“It’s the tragedy of the commons,” he said. “Because the resources belong to no one, they belong to everyone.” In the EU, 27 countries have to come to a consensus on a common fishing policy. There’s no mentality of making a sacrifice for preservation, Penas said. “People think: Whatever I do not fish, my neighbor will.”

David Cabo (Spain), Fredrik Laurin (Sweden) and Brigitte Alfter (Denmark) contributed to this story.

Spain doles out millions in aid despite fishing company's record

Spain — 2012-07-17T12:12:35-04:00

One of the world’s most controversial fishing operations — a family-controlled company in northwestern Spain linked to more than 40 cases of alleged illegal fishing — is changing tack. Antonio Vidal Pego, co-owner of Vidal Armadores, says the company is folding, and he’s devoting himself to renewable energy and fish oil. But fisheries officials in Brussels are not convinced.

Trafficking in fish is a thriving global black market. It fuels organized crime and the rapid disappearance of the oceans’ most valuable species, including top predators that scientists say are vital to the balance of the marine ecosystem. Nine out of 10 large fish are already gone, marine biologists say.

Many claim Vidal Pego has been one of the most infamous players in this trade – a so-called “pirate” fisherman.

“You can see I don’t have a hook, a parrot on my shoulder or a wooden leg,” the 38-year-old says as he sits down to lunch in a private room at Restaurante Berenguela in Santiago de Compostela, the capital of the Galician region. He says it is his company’s first on-the-record interview.

“We want to erase a story that has never been erased because there’s always someone trying to revive it,” he says. “So much damage has been done by the bad press, we’ve gone from a dynamic company to nothing.”

Vidal Pego — known as “Toño” — says his family business Vidal Armadores, “ship-owners” in Spanish, has been forced to halt operations. He insists that the company has opened a new chapter and moved beyond its controversial past.

When a reporter brings up allegations of his past involvement in the lucrative illegal trade in Patagonian Toothfish — sold in the U.S. under the more appetizing name Chilean sea bass — he says he and his father have only fished legally.

Yet his response leaves room for debate.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has reviewed hundreds of records — including court records, government investigative files and official correspondence — from a half dozen countries. They offer quite another picture – one in which the company has systematically employed legal maneuvers to circumvent international laws.

The ICIJ investigation found that Vidal Armadores or its affiliates have been repeatedly pursued by government agencies and international regulators for its role in a decade-old network of vessels that entered the remote and protected waters of the Antarctic and targeted toothfish in violation of an international convention.

Since 1999, international fisheries regulators have linked vessels owned by Vidal Armadores or its affiliates to more than 40 instances of alleged illegal fishing — more formally referred to by international regulators as Illegal, Unregulated and Unreported fishing — ranging from using banned fishing gear to targeting protected kitefish shark.

While most of the allegations have not resulted in penalties beyond the inclusion of the boats on international “black lists” of vessels, countries from Mozambique to the U.S. have fined the company or its affiliates five times totaling more than $5 million. Vidal Armadores or its affiliates have landed in court six times in criminal or administrative cases related to alleged illegal fishing. Vidal Pego pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in a U.S. federal court in a 2006 case involving an illegal importation of toothfish by a Vidal Armadores affiliate.

But while accusations of illegal fishing mounted against Vidal Armadores, Spain and the EU granted at least €8.2 million ($12 million) in subsidies to the family’s companies since the mid-1990s, government records show.

The Viarsa chapter

To a large extent the region of Galicia — home to Europe's largest fishing port, Vigo — is still reliant on fish even though the waters of the European Union are among the most exploited in the world. Three out of four European fish stocks are overfished.

It is here in Galicia that a handful of families have pulled the strings of a transnational network of vessels. And it’s the Vidal family that helped many get into the business by navigating the vessel registration process in Uruguay — a base from which many of the blacklisted ships operated. The Vidals set up offices in Montevideo, hired locals to manage and — when legal claims were brought — to take the blame, court records show.

It was one of those Uruguay-flagged vessels, the Viarsa 1, that put the Vidals on the radar of law enforcement officials around the world.

The Viarsa was spotted in a 2003 suspected illegal fishing operation at Heard Island near the Antarctic Peninsula. The Australian patrol vessel Southern Supporter chased the Viarsa for 21 days almost all the way to South Africa — a chase that ended with the Viarsa being escorted back to Australia. Two years and two trials later, the Vidal affiliate that owned the vessel was acquitted in court. The defense had argued that the toothfish in the Viarsa’s hold had been caught before the vessel entered Australian waters.

The Viarsa chase soon became the subject of a critically acclaimed book. “I know that [the author] had to rewrite the end [when we won!]” Vidal Pego said, with an ironic smile.

According to Vidal Pego, after the Australian authorities lost the case, an international campaign started. “There was tremendous pressure against everything that sounded like Vidal Armadores.”

Vidal Pego is now the face of the company. He is dressed in a black suit, a light pink chequered tie, flashing shiny silver cufflinks and buffed black leather shoes. He is obliging and affable. The only one in the room who is losing composure is Vidal Armadores’ press officer, Foro Hernández, who is repeatedly angered when questions get detailed.

The older Vidal — or “Tucho” — does not join the interview. At 59, he is a legend in fishing circles, a pillar of a clan with a long-standing fishing tradition. He went to sea as a kid, long before Spain joined the European Union, when there were few laws governing how much or where he could fish. He has never spoken to the press except to tell them to “get lost” in that traditional language of the region.

Vidal Pego by contrast spent a year studying in Louisiana, carries a Blackberry and zealously guards his well-buffed image. He says he fears seeing his name in Google searches for the next 10 years whenever someone types “illegal toothfish.”

But while Vidal Pego wants to put fishing behind him, Vidal Armadores continues to attract the attention of authorities. Just this February, fisheries inspectors from New Zealand snapped pictures from a plane as two blacklisted vessels, which had long been controlled by Vidal affiliates, plied their trade in the toothfish-rich waters of the eastern Indian Ocean, European Commission records show.

The Xiong Nu Baru and Sima Qian Baru were flying a North Korean flag — a country not party to the Antarctic fishing treaty protecting the area. The Sima Qian Baru used to be the Vidal Armadores ship the Dorita, flying a Uruguayan flag, according to official blacklists maintained by fisheries regulators. Before that it was the Magnus, flagged to St. Vincent & the Grenadines in the Caribbean. Before that it was the Eolo, flagged to Equatorial Guinea.

Fisheries enforcement officials cite a litany of loopholes that allow vessels to operate with impunity: vast waters to patrol; the use of subsidiaries in tax havens and constant renaming and reflagging of vessels. Flagging to countries such as North Korea, which are not party to fishing conventions, render enforcement authorities impotent when those vessels enter protected zones.

“It’s almost laughable that vessels change their names,” said Keith Reid, scientist with the Commission for the Conservation of the Antarctic Marine Living Resources, (CCAMLR), the body charged with enforcing the rules of the Antarctic fishing treaty. “Often you can see the old name underneath. It’s like a child’s graffiti.”

The Vidals operated the Dorita through subsidiaries in Uruguay and Spain, incorporation and vessel registry records show. After it got in trouble, they changed the vessel’s registration — as they did with other boats — to countries such as Sierra Leone and Panama, which are not members of the Antarctic fishing treaty.

Vidal Pego says the company sold both the Dorita and the other ship currently flagged to North Korea around 2006 or maybe 2007. New Zealand and EU officials have their doubts. So this March, fisheries officials in Brussels repeated in a letter what has become a frequent request over the years — that Spain investigate whether Vidal Armadores continues to control a pirate fishing fleet in the Antarctic.

Patagonian Toothfish

One likely reason the Vidals and others started plying the remote and dangerous waters of the Antarctic was the decline of the cod. When seemingly endless amounts of the fish off Newfoundland, Canada, disappeared in the 1990s after decades of intensive catches, the world’s appetite for white fish had to be satisfied with something else. Boats went further south, and dipped their hooks deeper until they found the big-eyed, mud-brown bottom dweller that now turns a huge profit on the U.S. market. Chilean sea bass is sold for upward of $25 a pound, almost twice as much the price of cod. Its stocks have been heavily fished in the past decade.

Spain is home to the most heavily subsidized fishing fleet in the EU, subsidy data shows.

The country also has a long history of failing to enforce catch limits, inspect vessels or punish fishermen who break the law, according to rulings by the EU Court of Justice. And it has continued to fund companies that had been punished for illegal fishing, according to an analysis of court cases and subsidies data by ICIJ. With one of the world’s largest fleets, Spain also ranks among the top five countries whose nationals register their ships in places like North Korea, which allow them to keep real ownership a secret and ignore international conventions governing huge swaths of the world’s oceans.

Vidal Pego has more than his reputation at stake. His latest venture is an Omega 3 oil factory, Biomega Nutrición, which is slated to receive about €4 million ($5.7 million) in subsidies from the local government and the EU.

“I´m looking forward to providing people better health through fish-oil supplements,” he says. But not everyone thinks he should get the money.

NGOs have protested and so has the European Commission. New European fisheries control legislation enacted last year empowers countries to prohibit public aid from flowing to companies with a history of illegal fishing. Ernesto Penas Lado, director of the Commission’s fisheries policy unit, said he is following the case closely to make sure the regional government of Galicia enforces the new law, which may result in the Vidal family not getting the subsidy.

Throughout the years, Brussels officials have repeatedly pleaded with Spain to “take action against Vidal Armadores” and pursue the recovery of public monies.

Penas Lado said Spain has been “too scared” to act against Vidal Armadores, fearing a drawn out court battle, and too worried it lacked sufficient evidence to win a case.

“These people [the Vidals] will fight to the end,” Penas said. “They say, ‘Hey, why aren't you giving me the subsidy?’ And they go to court.”

Lucrative trade

The global black market in fish is worth between $10 billion and $23 billion, more than the illicit trades in gold or stolen art. The United Nations categorizes these sophisticated international networks as organized crime. “Like tobacco, trafficking in black-market fish won’t incur the same punishment as drugs or arms. Nobody is looking. Because it’s fish,” said Lt. Cmdr. Daniel Schaeffer, chief of U.S. Coast Guard Fisheries Enforcement. “Any illicit transnational crime is going to be interesting to organized crime.”

The black market for toothfish is an especially lucrative business. A vessel fishing illegally can bring in 1,500 tons in a single season — a haul worth $83 million at a U.S. fish counter.

CCAMLR, the Antarctic fishing regulatory commission, imposes catch limits and drafts regulations against pirate fishing in the southern oceans. Only member countries are legally allowed to fish in the zone, which covers the waters surrounding Antarctica. Boats must be licensed and abide by catch limits. Vessels cannot resupply or transship with blacklisted vessels. Once on a black list, a vessel will find it difficult to dock at many world ports.

“You basically have to be very fast, to get on them before they destroy evidence,” said Marcel Krouse, a South African expert on illegal fishing who assisted in the Viarsa pursuit. “That’s the fundamental problem: The longer the duration between crime and apprehension, the more evidence gets lost.”

And that’s only if they get caught. Otherwise fisheries management commissions like CCAMLR have to rely on diplomatic pressure. “There are a lot of loopholes in the system,” Krouse said. “How are you going to get any response from North Korea?”

Fished out

Illegal fishing is becoming a major threat to fish-stocks in the world. The UN estimates that 85 percent of all fish stocks in the oceans are fished to the very limit of — or beyond — sustainable levels.

There are no longer plenty of fish left in the sea, and scientists warn that killing off too many top predators such as cod or toothfish upsets the ecosystem the same way that taking out a keystone would affect an archway.

Long-lived and slow to mature, a toothfish may be 20 years old before it can reproduce. It is especially vulnerable as fishermen target the large, old fish that produce the next generation. Scientists believe the stock is holding steady but their assessments are limited. Toothfish swim almost a mile beneath the surface in remote oceans, and researchers have to rely on legal fishermen for their data.

The waiters at Restaurant Berenguela empty the plates; Vidal Pego has had hake cheeks with tagliatelle. His take on the scientific reports of steady decline in the world fish stocks is “nonsense.” He says the quantities of hake in the waters off Ireland are bigger than ever; same goes for cod.

Natives of the remote Galician village of Riveira, a town built around the fishing port, the Vidals are politically connected in the region. They have earned the community’s respect for activities such as sponsoring the local taekwondo club or donating money to charities for people with disabilities.

“To me they have always been gentlemen,” said Manuel Torres, a skipper from Riveira. And in cases when their vessels were seized, Torres said, “he got everyone out [of jail]. He paid for lawyers.”

Luis Pazos, Vidal Armadores’ former Uruguayan associate, agrees. “The Vidals are a family of fishermen. They always have been,” he said. “Those men think differently. If you start talking about [illegal fishing], they don’t understand it; they don’t care. Their goal is to fish and maximize production.”

Vidal Pego says that he hasn’t been in the toothfish business since 2006, the year he and one of his affiliates pleaded guilty to criminal charges in a case involving the importation of illegal catches into the U.S. Based on his entry of a guilty plea to one count of obstruction of justice, the judge gave Vidal Pego probation and ordered him to stay out of the trade for four years or risk spending 20 years in a U.S. prison.

He says Vidal Armadores itself has never been criminally convicted of illegal fishing. That is true. But Vidal Armadores or its affiliated companies have repeatedly been sanctioned in related legal actions, including more than $5 million in fines for five separate cases.

Two New Zealand fishing inspectors remain troubled by this record.

Paloma V

In May 2008 the Paloma V docked at New Zealand’s Auckland port. More than 200 tons of fish weighed down the boat's hold: sea bass slated for U.S. dinner plates, shark fins headed to Portugal and fish liver oil for a Japanese cosmetics company. The fishing master had submitted a required declaration that the ship had not done business with pirate fishing vessels. But fisheries investigators Phil Kerr and Dominic Hayden decided to take a closer look.

The Paloma V was half owned by an Uruguayan subsidiary of Vidal Armadores. And Kerr and Hayden knew that a U.S. judge had ordered Vidal Pego to stay away from the toothfish trade.

After copying the hard drives of the Paloma’s computers as part of the port inspection, Kerr and Hayden discovered evidence that they thought might piece together what law enforcement officials from the U.S. to New Zealand had suspected for years: that Vidal Armadores was a central player in a network of pirate fishing vessels targeting toothfish in the Antarctic.

Records from the hard drive showed blacklisted vessels relied on counterparts with legal licenses from places such as Spain, Uruguay and Namibia, the New Zealand investigators found. Receipts found aboard the Paloma V established that Vidal Armadores paid to provision the boats. Photographs showed transshipments to blacklisted vessels. And numerous emails detailed the sharing of bait, fuel and crew.

One of Vidal Armadores’ partners in the Paloma V was interviewed by the inspectors, and they showed him document after document, including photos of the vessel illegally transshipping supplies to the Chilbo San 33 — an earlier incarnation of the Xiong Nu Baru, one of those North Korean-flagged ships spotted this year. Screen-shots from one of the on-board computers showed multiple blacklisted vessels tracked through an online system called Fleetview, suggesting a close coordination among the vessels in the network.

Questions about the Paloma V are the only ones that visibly upset Vidal Pego. He explains that it all was “completely outrageous.” He says the computer was the fishing master’s personal laptop. But the New Zealand inspection file obtained by ICIJ shows three on-board, stand-alone computers were inspected.

To Vidal Pego this case is just more of the same: “There’s no point in talking about fishing, since I haven’t had anything to do with fishing for a long time now.”

Emails found onboard the Paloma V show the company Vidal Armadores allegedly directing a whole network of vessels.

The computers contained emails to and from mantoniovipe@gmail.com (Vidal Pego’s full name is Manuel Antonio Vidal Pego). Vidal Pego dismisses knowledge of the email account or any network: “I — or nobody I know — is in any type of syndicate.”

Vidal Pego says transshipments are common in the high seas because “you cannot go to the supermarket [there].” To him, vessels meet to trade food or even movies — nothing else.

Corporate records also appeared to tie Vidal Pego to the toothfish business well after he promised the U.S. judge he would get out of the trade. Vidal Pego was one of two managers of Vidal Armadores’ parent company, Viarsa Cartera.

“What Vidal was doing was very organized, well structured,” Kerr said. “He had a legitimate fleet supplying the illegitimate fleet. When we saw this material, we saw he was obviously busier than ever.”

International arrest warrant

Of more than 40 allegations related to illegal fishing, the Vidals or their affiliates only landed in court six times.

U.S. officials seized an illegal shipment of their toothfish in 2002. Nothing ever came of that case. In 2004, however, another Vidal vessel, the Chilbo San 33 sold an illegal shipment to a U.S. buyer, according to court records. A federal prosecutor in Miami charged Vidal Pego and one of his Uruguayan companies with doctoring the records to disguise the origin of the fish.

Vidal Pego became wanted on an Interpol warrant and appeared in front of the Miami judge in 2006. His Uruguayan company Fadilur took the brunt of the blame, but Vidal Pego pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice and also agreed to stay away from toothfish.

Today, behind the wheel of his Porsche in his native Galicia, Vidal Pego says he made “many friends” in Miami and that he pleaded guilty only to make the process faster — and less expensive. Thinking back, he says, he should have fought. He’s sure he would have won.

The judgment said that if he in any way broke the law before November 2010, or engaged in the toothfish business, he could end up in a U.S. prison. So when Phil Kerr and Dominic Hayden of New Zealand Fisheries found evidence onboard the Paloma V that Vidal Pego allegedly was still engaged in the toothfish trade — such as telephone calls and email accounts — they quickly sent a copy of the computer hard drives to the United States.

They were surprised when the United States did not issue a warrant for Vidal Pego’s arrest. “We had email links and conversations. We thought there was enough. But for some reason it never happened in the end,” said Kerr.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Watts-Fitzgerald, based in Miami, could not recall having received any records. New Zealand court records show copies of the hard drives were sent to U.S. officials, and ICIJ pointed out that Watts-Fitzgerald was listed in official records as having sat in on conference calls to discuss the evidence. Watts-Fitzgerald then said, “any discussions of any nature would be law enforcement sensitive,” and directed further inquiry to the press office. The press office later said that Watts-Fitzgerald had no comment.

Off the hook

New Zealand authorities let the Paloma off with a warning instead of opening a time-consuming and legally-complex case against the ship owner. Since its release from New Zealand, the vessel has been seen fishing in Antarctic waters under a Mongolian, then a Belizean and then Cambodian flag, according to fisheries inspection reports. The European Commission suspected it was still a Vidal Armadores boat and in April 2010 sent another “please investigate” letter to Spain’s director general of fisheries. They wanted to know whether the Spanish company was still illegally targeting toothfish.

Vidal Pego claims the Paloma V is not his boat anymore. As for other cases of alleged illegal fishing, he has explanations: there were facts lost in translation; he had been conned into buying a fake fishing license and, in one case, an Uruguayan official wrote the wrong numbers on a U.S. import form.

He only admits to having three vessels with “a problem like this” — meaning illegal or unreported fishing. But later, in the car, he takes it a step further: “Maybe up until 2005 …” he pauses and thinks. “Maybe there was some activity of ours where it could be that a vessel with a flag from another country was fishing and it was inside the [protected] zone.”

Spain reported to international fisheries regulators last fall that it punished Vidal Armadores for the Paloma V’s involvement in illegal fishing — leveling a €150,000 fine ($214,000) and suspending all aid and fishing licenses in Spain for two years.

But the Vidals filed an appeal, so that penalty has not been enforced. The company has also appealed a separate fine imposed by Spain for illegally fishing sharks in Namibia. Notwithstanding the penalties, last year Vidal Armadores received subsidies from the government — this time not to fish hake and langoustine.

The public purse

Juan Carlos Martín Fragueiro was once a lobbyist for a Spanish ship-owners association. In that role, the gray-haired Galician was often seen in the fisheries ministry petitioning for subsidies on behalf of Vidal Armadores and others, according to sources in the ministry and an official exchange on the floor of Spain’s Parliament. Then, in 2004, Martín Fragueiro was appointed Spain’s fisheries secretary.

In total the Vidals have been granted at least €8.2 million ($12 million) in aid since 1996. They got money to fish in places like Comoros and Madagascar, and for an experimental fishing campaign. They even got money to stay at port.

When reached for comment the former fishing secretary denied any relationship with Vidal Armadores or having lobbied for it in the past. Martín Fragueiro said subsidy allocations were decided by committee. “On no occasion have I told the selection committee how it must make the selection. Never.”

Vidal Pego says the company just got what it was entitled to by law.

During his six-year tenure as fisheries secretary, Martín Fragueiro’s office was requested more than once a year by the European Commission to start investigations of suspected infringements by Vidal ships. Some letters were addressed to Martín Fragueiro personally. But for years no sanction was imposed against the company.

Martín Fragueiro said they initiated investigations every time there was a communication and then “we followed faithfully what the legal department told us.”

One example of a Vidal ships getting subsidies, getting caught, and then getting new subsidies is the Galaecia, built with a €1.5 million ($1.9 million) subsidy granted in 2002. Its monitoring system, which assures a boat is fishing where it should, was tampered with in 2003, according to the Spanish fisheries ministry. Vidal Pego says it simply broke. Spain fined the company €42,000 in 2004 but then paid it €1.3 million to fish near the Antarctic as part of a controversial scientific program.

During that same season, EU fisheries officials later wrote to Spain, the Galaecia was seen supplying the blacklisted Dorita (one of the two spotted this year flying a North Korean flag under the name of Sima Qian Baru). Vidal denied that this transshipment occurred. By 2005, six vessels operated by Vidal Armadores had been added to the Antarctic fisheries commission’s black list, according to official correspondence from the EU to Spain.

In one of the letters to the Spanish ministry, then-fisheries commissioner in Brussels Joe Borg begged Spain “for the sake of the credibility of the [European] Community” to pull the Galaecia’s fishing license. Spain took no action, and soon the ship was spotted again transshipping supplies to a blacklisted Vidal vessel.

The ship continued to get subsidies until 2008. That year, while the Commission was investigating whether it had laundered illegal catches, the boat caught fire and sank.

The Commission warned Martín Fragueiro in 2009 that if Spain did nothing, the EU might take legal action, but it never followed up on the threat.

The current Spanish fishing secretary, Alicia Villauriz, told ICIJ that the country’s regulations didn’t allow them to stop the subsidies to the company until they had enough evidence to impose a severe sanction. Spain determined it could finally act in the case of the Paloma V, 11 years after the first allegations of illegal fishing against the Vidals. With an appeal pending, even that action may not come.

Villauriz also said the government can’t recover previously given subsidies unless there is evidence that the money has been misused. “And we don't have information to think this has been the case.”

Meanwhile, in Mozambique another court ruling is waiting for the Vidals. In 2008 the government seized the Antillas Reefer when it targeted protected kite fish sharks. Mozambique confiscated the boat, converted her to a fisheries patrol boat and imposed a $4.5 million fine. The Spanish government negotiated the crew’s release, but after they had gone home no one wanted to pay the bill. And Mozambique never could collect the fine.

Vidal Pego says his company was a minority shareholder in the Namibian company that owned the vessel.

“Why should Vidal Armadores be responsible for the fine for a Namibian company?” he asks.

As for the two North-Korean flagged vessels spotted earlier this year fishing illegally, the European Commission said that Spain informed it that it is investigating whether the Xiong Nu Baru and Sima Qian Baru belong to Vidal Armadores. But there is nothing new to report. “Given that the investigations usually take time, we will not take additional steps for the time being,” the Commission wrote.

When contacted about this issue, the Spanish fisheries ministry’s reply was a general statement about the country’s commitment to fight illegal fishing. Unfortunately, the email continued, the law doesn’t permit the ministry to talk publicly about sanctions.

Meanwhile in Maputo officials are not giving up as easily. Manuel Castiano, Mozambique’s director of fisheries surveillance is adamant that Vidal Armadores, or Spain, should pay the fines. He is ready for some legal as well as diplomatic action. And he has use for the money.

“$4.5 million is a lot of money, and enough to run my patrol boats a while.”

Nicky Hager (New Zealand), Marcos Garcia Rey (Spain) and Fredrik Laurin (Sweden) contributed to this story.

Threatened bluefin tuna may not get much help from international conference

2011-09-30T12:09:19-04:00

Rejecting the tough stance of its top fisheries official, the European Union agreed Thursday to recommend similar catch limits as last year for the depleted stocks of Eastern Atlantic Bluefin Tuna.

The public position of the EU’s 27 countries – led by its three biggest fishing nations Spain, France and Italy – is still ambiguous. The EU statement says it will recommend that the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) “follow scientific advice” in setting the quota – but that could mean maintaining the status quo. The EU countries as a whole are but one member of ICCAT, which also includes 47 nations. ICCAT is meeting in Paris through Nov. 27 to decide the future of the Atlantic bluefin fishery.

News reports cite EU sources saying the commission will push for a quota somewhat similar to the current global limit of 13,500 tons (the upper limit scientists say that would give bluefin a 60 percent chance to recover from overfishing). European Commissioner Maria Damanaki, the EU’s top fisheries official, had recommended that the EU push ICCAT to cut the quota by more than half next season.

Damanaki issued a statement Wednesday saying that EU officials had ultimately chosen not to support her recommendation, but said she was nevertheless committed to negotiating on behalf of the European Union.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists recently published a 7-month investigation that revealed a $4 billion black market in Atlantic bluefin tuna, facilitated by widespread fraud and lack of official oversight.

Damanaki had seemingly taken a harder-line approach to catch limits during an interview with ICIJ at her office in Brussels last month.

“I’m looking forward to going to the ICCAT conference, and there we’ll decide about the future,” Damanaki said. “This year I have tried a lot. I’m not satisfied with the results, but now I know the difficulties.” Damanakai has said she would “stick to scientific advice."

This October, ICCAT’s scientists recommended a spectrum of catch limit of somewhere between zero and the current 13,500 tons. Due to years of overfishing, fraud and lack of official oversight the population of spawning bluefin has dipped 75 percent from historic highs.

“Last year, I was not sure about compliance, so I closed the [EU’s portion of the] fishery early,” Damanaki explained. “And I must confess to you this was not an easy situation for me. Member states would like this power in their hands.”

Despite the historic depletion of the stocks that has resulted from both fraud and failed management, Damanki spoke confidently at the time of fighting to limit the quota in spite of pressure from ministers in the EU fishing nations of Spain, France and Italy.

“Bluefin tuna will survive. We’re here for it,” she said. “The European Commission is going to take care of the stock.”

Thursday’s developments, however, cast doubt on that sunny outlook.

French officials finally respond to allegations of doctored data

2011-09-30T12:14:22-04:00

ICIJ’s Looting the Seas investigation, on the $4 billion black market in bluefin tuna, has attracted worldwide attention since its release this weekend. The series reveals how for a decade officials turned a blind eye to massive overfishing of Eastern Atlantic bluefin tuna — source of the world’s most coveted sushi — and manipulated national catch figures to protect their overbuilt fishing fleets.

ICIJ reporters sent a dozen written requests for interviews with officials within the French Ministry of Agriculture and Fishing, which oversees one of the world’s major tuna fishing fleets.

Forty-eight days after ICIJ sent its first interview request to the ministry, officials finally responded Monday to allegations that for years leading up to 2008, the ministry downplayed the final catch figures of the nation’s bluefin tuna fishing fleet before reporting those figures to the European Commission.

Since 2007 the ministry “has stopped the practices of earlier years and strictly enforces the regulations,” the statement says. “In complete transparency, France declared all its overfishing and was sanctioned in 2008. Since 2008, the quotas have been strictly enforced.”

ICIJ now has evidence that even in the 2010 fishing season, Mediterranean fleets – including that of France – have flouted the rules set by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT). ICIJ will release those findings Wednesday.

In attempts to obtain a response on allegations that catch figures were downplayed, ICIJ asked for comments from Agriculture and Fisheries Minister Bruno Le Maire and Jean-Marie Aurand, a former director of fishing and currently the ministry’s secretary general. After a series of emails, the press secretary responded with an email saying, “Currently absent. Please send urgent emails to cab-presse.agripeche@agriculture.gouv.fr.” That final email request was ignored.

ICIJ also attempted to interview two other former directors of fishing and former Minister Michel Barnier. All three declined to comment.

ICIJ’s seven-month investigation is appearing as a BBC World News documentary and in publications worldwide. Among our partners: the EU Observer, Le Soir, El Pais, Il Fatto Quotidiano,Trouw, the Sunday Times and The Huffington Post.

Members of the European Parliament and WWF are hosting a showing of the BBC documentary tomorrow at the Parliament.

Looting the Seas

2011-11-20T15:30:57-05:00

As regulators gather in Paris in mid November to decide the fate of Atlantic bluefin tuna, 'Looting the Seas' reveals the sorry saga of illegal over-fishing that has led to plummeting global stocks. ICIJ reporter Kate Willson and colleagues discover that attempts to save bluefin stocks are still threatened by crucial missing data, and there's evidence that governments across the Mediterranean connived in the growth of a vast Black Market, worth US$4 billion over the last 10 years. As the global appetite for sushi spreads beyond Japan, is it too late to rescue stocks of one of Nature's most noble fish, prized by the Romans, and today worth often thousands of dollars each?

Overview: The black market in bluefin

2012-01-25T14:28:56-05:00

Along the Mediterranean coast of France, in the city of Montpellier, prosecutors are quietly putting on trial an ancient French tradition — the fishing and trading of the majestic Eastern Atlantic bluefin tuna, a sushi delicacy sold in restaurants from New York to Tokyo. The still-secret proceedings accuse some of France’s most prominent fishing masters of illegally catching several hundred tons of the prized bluefin, a fish so severely plundered in the Mediterranean that this year it was proposed for listing as an endangered species alongside panda bears.

Bluefin tuna is one of the sea’s most valuable species, a highly migratory fish that can weigh more than 500 kilograms and live 40 years. One large fish can fetch more than $100,000 in Japan, which consumes around 80 percent of the global bluefin market. The widely hunted bluefin has also become a bellwether, the latest threatened species in a feeding frenzy that has seen the disappearance of as much as 90 percent of the ocean’s large fish.

Behind the demise of the bluefin is a kind of Wild West of fishing, in which fishermen, traders, and regulators have for years widely ignored the rules. “Everyone cheated,” said Roger Del Ponte, one of the six French fishing captains facing criminal charges. “There were rules, but we didn’t follow them. It’s like driving down the road. If I know there are no police, I’m going to speed … They didn’t care, then all of a sudden, boom!”

The fishermen, for their part, say they were part of a culture that manipulated national catch figures to shield France’s bluefin fishing industry from international scrutiny. They charge that the real culprit is missing in the courtroom: their nation’s Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries.

In fact, in what has become one of the world’s most notorious fisheries, France is just one player — and there’s plenty of blame to go around.

As regulators gather in Paris later this month to decide the fate of the Atlantic bluefin, a seven-month investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has found that behind the plummeting stocks is a decade-long history of rampant fraud and lack of official oversight. Each year, thousands of tons of fish have been illegally caught and traded. At its peak — between 1998 and 2007 — this black market included more than one out of every three bluefin caught.

The questionable practices extend across the industry, ICIJ found, from fishing fleets and farms, through ministry offices, to distributors in Japan. Led by the French, Spanish, and Italians, joined by Turks and others, Mediterranean fishermen violated official quotas at will and engaged in an array of illegal practices: misreporting catch size, hiring banned spotter planes, catching undersized fish, and plundering tuna from North African waters where EU inspectors are refused entry. An illicit market even arose in trading quotas — when regulators finally started enforcing the rules — in which one vessel sells its nation’s quota to a foreign vessel that had overfished.

The bluefin black market is not a surprise to some experts. “Fisheries are one of the most criminalized sectors in the world,” said Daniel Pauly, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia, who was one of the earliest voices to warn the world about the impact of commercial fishing on marine ecosystems. “This generates so much money that it’s like drugs.”

Though not always an outright criminal market, the pervasive lack of accountability and the widespread practice of lying about catch amounts have given rise to an off-the-books trade conservatively estimated at $4 billion in revenue between 1998 and 2007, according to an analysis by ICIJ. The analysis was based on official estimates of total catch, Japan wholesale market prices, and official quotas, the limits issued to countries of how many fish they can catch in a single season.

This black market has been abetted by a host of officials, from overworked local inspectors to international regulators — most notably the International Commission for the Conservation of the Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), a regulatory body set up to protect the bluefin stocks, which frequently ignored its own scientists’ recommendations for smaller fishing quotas and tighter controls.

“There was just no political will to enforce the rules, most notably the quota,” said Jean- Marc Fromentin, a marine biologist and a member of ICCAT’s scientific body. “Until 2008 … there was no enforcement. No one declared. There was general cheating.”

As a result, the Eastern Atlantic bluefin spawning stock has plummeted by nearly 75 percent over the past four decades, with more than half of that loss occurring between 1997 and 2007, according to ICCAT figures. Today fleets are down to much smaller fish, including juveniles, further curtailing the chances of the stock to recover. Some scientists believe that continued lack of controls and generous quotas could result in wiping out the entire adult bluefin population.

Biologists warn that at stake is more than the mere loss of a favorite source of sushi. Bluefin tuna, they say, are near the top of the food chain and their demise will have dire consequences for marine ecosystems. Without large predators, entire food chains may erode, leaving the seas overrun by millions of jelly fish and micro-organisms.

Alarmed at the rate of bluefin decline, ICCAT regulators came up with a new paper-based reporting system in 2008 designed to help them better track the trade and deter the black market. But the system — dubbed the Bluefin Tuna Catch Document Scheme, or BCD — is full of holes, rendering the data almost useless, the ICIJ investigation found. Officials have also launched a belated crackdown on the illicit trade, but it is helping push the bluefin industry to renegade fleets in North Africa and Turkey.

The ICIJ inquiry relied on more than 200 interviews with fishermen, ranchers, divers, officials, scientists, and traders, as well as court documents, regulatory reports, and corporate records in ten countries, including France, Spain, Japan, and Tunisia. In addition, ICIJ gained access through an ICCAT member country to the commission’s internal BCD database and ran an extensive analysis of the data.

Fraudulent fleets, complicit officials

For decades, the market for Mediterranean bluefin tuna remained modest and largely regional. That changed in the 1980s, when the Japanese developed a taste for toro, the fatty belly flesh of the bluefin. What followed was the rapid development of a heavily subsidized EU fleet of specialized “purse seining” vessels, which vastly expanded catch size by using giant nets that can trap as many as 3,000 fish at a time.

Over the past decade, more than €800 million of aid poured in yearly from the EU and member states to the overall European fishing industry, helping build overcapacity in the Mediterranean fleets.

ICCAT established the first country quotas in 1998, just as Spanish and Croatian fishmongers revolutionized the industry by setting up what were called “farms” — sea ranches, really — in the Mediterranean, where the fish are fattened for months before being shot in the head and shipped to Japan.

Soon the market ballooned — the Japanese were willing to pay big for bluefin, and the fishermen needed the money to repay bank loans for their vessels. Until 2003, the cost of fishing, transporting, and fattening a bluefin tuna peaked at 12 euros a kilo, but it was sold to the Japanese for at least five times that amount. Scientists and fishermen call the period between 1997 and 2007 “the jungle” — a time of blatant overfishing and rule-breaking.

Joining the EU fleets was ICCAT member Turkey, which ran a large, dilapidated fleet notorious for flouting the law. Meanwhile, North African states — Algeria, Libya, Egypt, and Tunisia — sold EU vessels entrance into their rich, unregulated waters in exchange for a cut of the catch, fishermen say. The result: annual catches jumped to 50,000 to 60,000 metric tons — almost double a typical quota of 30,000, according to ICCAT estimates, and three times what ICCAT scientists deemed sustainable. In 2007, the bluefin fishery spawning stock hit a record low — 78,724 tons, less than a third of its peak in 1958.

The widespread rule-breaking made it nearly impossible to crack down. “From the moment a person commits fraud, when he fills out false documents, then there is absolutely no way to control the fishery,” said French prosecutor Patrick Desjardin, who is heading the investigation into illegal fishing by French fishermen.

Worsening matters was the apparent complicity of government officials. Even when fishermen fully declared their catches, the national numbers were later “fixed” at the ministry level, which is responsible for transmitting the official country catch to EU regulators, according to officials and industry sources.

Joseph Salou, the former head of the fishing trade association Sa.Tho.An, in Sète, said the decision over what catch figures to declare to EU regulators was a “collaboration” between industry groups like his and officials with the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries in Paris. “It was a discussion we had every year, the administration and the industry, because the administration was also complicit,” said Salou, who participated in the talks.

An official in the ministry, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve his job, said he had expected investigators to knock on his door and demand why he and others had done nothing to stop the illegal fishing. “People at the ministry at the time knew that if the police did their job, sooner or later they would be asking about the government’s role,” he said.

But that visit never came.

The situation reached a head in 2007 when France declared its real catch: nearly 10,000 tons — almost double its allowed ICCAT quota for the year. Publicity around the overfishing triggered a criminal investigation, resulting in charges in Montpellier against the six fishermen. No French officials have been charged.

ICIJ made a dozen written requests to the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries asking that it respond to allegations that its officials colluded in doctoring catch data. The Ministry never responded.

Ranching: bluefin black holes

Since they started to appear in the Mediterranean in the mid-1990s, ranches became the epicenter of some of the worst excesses in the Atlantic bluefin tuna fishery. Today there are more than 60 ranches spread across the Mediterranean, many in laxly-regulated places like Tunisia, Cyprus, and Turkey. Together, they hold the capacity to process nearly three times more fish than fishermen have been allowed to legally catch in recent years.

As Japanese demand for bluefin increased, these opaque underwater labyrinths of nets and cages, where counting fish is almost impossible, became the perfect counterpart to the out-of-control fishing fleets. Much of the fish illegally caught in the past 15 years in the Mediterranean was laundered at the farm level, industry insiders say.

Behind the shift to sea ranching were the Japanese. Leading Japanese trading houses and seafood companies like Mitsubishi Corporation and Maruha helped set up and fund a ranching system that by the late 1990s was supplying more than half of Mediterranean bluefin. Francisco Martinez, who in 1994 opened the region’s first ranch in Cartagena, Spain, said the Japanese financed the fishing campaigns in advance, and provided technical support to set up the cages and test the quality of the fish. In Croatia, Mitsubishi underwrote loans for its trading partners.

Ranching forever changed the nature of the Atlantic bluefin trade. Instead of catching the fish, killing them, and returning to port, vessels transferred live fish from their nets into cages, which slowly towed the fish to ranches to be fattened. But because the entire process happens under water, with live fish swimming about, ranching made it nearly impossible to verify the weight or number of fish caught.

At the ranches, various ways emerged to “launder” fish, according to interviews with ranchers, divers, and inspectors. Techniques included under-declaring the amount of tuna acquired, killed, or traded; mixing legal catches with illegal catches; exaggerating the fattening rates of tuna to account for the extra weight of illegal fish; and transferring illegal fish to ranches in less regulated states. “For the fish that are over quota, you have to find a solution” at the end of the season, said a former manager for a leading Spanish rancher. “You either trade it illegally or keep it until the next season … We took the over-quota fish to Tunisia.”

After years of no-questions-asked, Japanese officials have started to balk at the excesses of the ranching industry. In 2009, Japan refused entry of more than 3,500 tons of suspicious shipments of Atlantic bluefin tuna — about one-sixth of the country’s supply that year. All but 800 tons were eventually allowed in, but the Japanese were making it clear that it would not longer be business as usual. Among the problems Japanese inspectors found: ranch tuna were fattened at rates that were biologically impossible, and some ranches tried to export more fish than vessels had supplied to them. “This is incomprehensible, no matter which way you look at it,” said Masanori Miyahara, head of the Japanese delegation to ICCAT. “It is not as if the fish lay eggs and propagate while in the pen. We said this is nonsense.”

In fact, ICIJ’s analysis of the Bluefin Tuna Catch Document database, the reporting system established by ICCAT to track the trade, shows that in 2008 and 2009 more than a dozen ranches in the Mediterranean appear to have somehow killed more fish than they acquired. The analysis also found that at least 20 percent of the tuna that ranches reported killing at their facilities during those years — some 118,000 fish — lack export information, effectively turning those fish into ghost tuna that regulators can’t track to their final destination.

One ranch attracting attention from authorities is Drvenik Tuna, a Croatian facility co-owned by the Cartagena, Spain-based Ricardo Fuentes & Sons, an industry pioneer which operates farms around the Mediterranean, including Malta, Tunisia, and Cyprus. Drvenik Tuna is jointly owned by Fuentes, Japanese trading giant Mitsubishi, and local partner Conex Trade. Drvenik has drawn criticism since its founding in 1998. Among the official complaints were setting up a ranch without proper authorization and operating a vessel without valid documents, according to enforcement records and interviews. Environmentalists have also complained that the company polluted nearby waters by dumping fish remains. Mitsubishi said Drvenik is “in full compliance with local and ICCAT regulations.”

In December 2008, Drvenik Tuna was forced to release 712 bluefin caught by French vessels after officials ruled the fish were illegally underweight, according to an ICCAT compliance report and Croatian officials. A year later, Japanese officials refused to allow the import of 560 tons of bluefin caught by two Algerian vessels and fattened at a Fuentes ranch in Tunisia because the fish had no accompanying documentation, according to ICCAT compliance records. Again, Fuentes was ordered to release the fish.

A Fuentes manager in Tunisia, Amor Samet, acknowledged the incident and said the Algerian fisheries ministry refused to validate the catch due to “problems” with the fisherman involved. The episode prompted Japan to temporarily halt imports of bluefin tuna from Tunisia in 2009.

A half-billion dollars of bluefin

The trail of the bluefin tuna ultimately leads to Japan, whose avid fish eaters comprise the world’s biggest market. Although not the size it once was, Japan’s Atlantic bluefin market was valued at more than $500 million annually last year.

The popular image of Japan’s bluefin tuna industry is Tsukiji, the world’s largest fish market in central Tokyo, where tuna are auctioned off each morning in a dizzying array of nods, winks, and arcane signs. But most tuna are not auctioned these days; they are sold directly to buyers and distributed through an intricate web of trading houses, brokers, importers, processors, wholesalers, and retailers. At the top of this well-oiled distribution system sits Mitsubishi. Better known for trading in cars, chemicals, and steel, the corporate giant owns subsidiaries that control about 40 percent of the bluefin market in Japan.

To feed their ravenous tuna market, the Japanese also import a large amount of southern bluefin, a sister species to the Atlantic bluefin from the southern oceans. Worried that Japan’s fishing fleet was fast depleting the southern bluefin, in 2006 Australian officials joined with their Japanese counterparts in a three-month-long inquiry. The final report proved to be a damning indictment of Japan’s tuna fishing industry, as well as of the government in Tokyo, whose poor controls had allowed massive imports of bootlegged bluefin into Japan. So embarrassing were the findings that the report was kept secret and its researchers were made to sign non-disclosure agreements.

ICIJ has gained access to the report, modestly titled Independent Review of Japanese Southern Bluefin Tuna Market Data Anomalies. The study reveals two decades of overfishing of southern bluefin tuna by Japan, with widespread sale of under-reported or unreported catches. Japanese traders “laundered” bluefin by importing it as cheaper species and then renaming it at the marketplace, the study found. “What we were talking about was a minimum $6-$7 billion [Australian dollars] of illegal catch, a lot of jobs, and the international humiliation of Japan,” said an Australian tuna industry source knowledgeable about the study.

As a result of the report’s findings, Japanese quotas of southern bluefin tuna were cut by half. But the no-questions-asked policy of Japan’s importers and regulators changed little until recently. “The Japanese are the designers and financiers of the Mediterranean farming system,” said Sergi Tudela of the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental group. “Now the system is out of control, and they are scrambling to distance themselves from it.” In 2008, responding to concern about plummeting bluefin stocks, Mitsubishi pledged to work toward a more sustainable fishery. “We will not purchase bluefin tuna from suppliers who do not meet our requirements, or who are found to be in violation of applicable laws and regulations,” reads a company statement.

BCDs: “A Bloody Mess”

As officials in the Pacific suppressed their own report on southern bluefin, environmental outcry over the fate of Eastern Atlantic bluefin was building in Europe. In 2006, ICCAT launched a 15-year plan to replenish the stock by reducing quotas and increasing the minimum catch size. But the limits outlined were still twice as high as ICCAT’s own scientists recommended.

Fisherman used to years of hands-off treatment were slow to believe the rhetoric of a crackdown, even when quotas for individual vessels were added alongside national quotas in 2008. “No one thought we were really going to have to respect the quota,” French fisherman Nicolas Giordano recalled. “They said, ‘We’ll fish what we want, and we’ll see what happens.’” Other fishermen say they responded by colluding even more closely with their ranching partners to launder the overcatch. They also increased profits by selling quotas in places like Malta and Turkey.

In 2008, ICCAT commissioned a panel of independent auditors to review its performance. Their report condemned ICCAT’s member countries for having “failed to abide by their legal obligations…failed to conserve bluefin tuna and failed in the eyes of the international community.” But their dramatic call for the immediate closure of bluefin fishing and ranching was ignored.

Instead, ICCAT launched the Bluefin Tuna Catch Document Scheme (BCD), a program that the European Commission lauded as bringing “complete and reliable traceability” to the trade. Under the BCD system, vessels are given a unique number for each catch, which follows the fish to ranch, through harvest, and finally to market. All along the supply chain, players are required to provide detailed information about the number, size, and location of the fish. The hand-written documents are validated by national fisheries authorities and submitted to ICCAT, where the data are manually entered into a database.

ICIJ gained access to the BCD database through an ICCAT member country and found the system riddled with incomplete information and discrepancies. For example, during 2008 and 2009 more than 75 percent of all purse seiner catches — which comprise nearly half of the overall catch — are missing crucial information that regulators need to follow the fish from vessel to market. For example, the US imported nearly 500 tons of bluefin during those two years, yet not a single kilo is accounted for in the database. When asked by ICIJ about the missing import data, US officials said they were unaware the information was not in the database. “That’s kind of something I’m having trouble understanding. Because we report that,” said Rebecca Lent, director of International Affairs for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Then there’s the backlog — as of June this year, catch data for 2008 were still incomplete. Asked about shortcomings in the database, ICCAT executive secretary Driss Meski said he was unaware if the data entered were incomplete or inconsistent.

ICCAT’s compliance chair, Christopher Rogers, attended a meeting in February along with Mr. Meski during which they discussed the backlog. He said his committee considered trying to analyze the database earlier this year, but gave up because the data was so incomplete.

With the Japanese starting to reject fish without properly filled BCDs, industry sources say the forms have become as valuable as the tuna. Industry sources say a new scam has emerged — faking fishing operations to obtain a validated BCD. “If you have tuna, but you don’t have documents, then you don’t have tuna,” explained one rancher. “You can always sell the form to the highest bidder.”

"It's just a bloody mess," said ICCAT scientist Fromentin of the BCD system.

A culture of secrecy

A wall of secrecy protects the bluefin industry. “I can understand there is a need for transparency,” Maria Damanaki, the European Commission’s top fisheries official, told ICIJ. “If any case is complete, you should have the full data."

Yet ICIJ requests to the European Commission for records on fishing and farming infringements were routinely denied. The commission took 48 days — three times longer than regulations allow — to answer a freedom of information request by ICIJ on bluefin fishery infraction records. The Commission denied ICIJ access to the data citing protection of commercial interests and even “military matters.”

Response at the national level was no better. In Spain, the Ministry of the Environment and Rural and Marine Affairs refused to release details on administrative actions taken against bluefin fishery offenders. In Croatia, officials failed to produce fishing inspection records of vessels and ranches. In Turkey, officials canceled an interview to discuss compliance issues.

Illicit catches, meanwhile, remain a serious problem. In southern Italy last month, officials seized a catch of 500 baby bluefin weighting an average of just one kilo. And in North Africa and Turkey, even less accountable fleets are ramping up operations. Ranking officials in Algeria’s Ministry of Fishing were convicted this year of trafficking in contraband tuna, influence peddling and tax evasion ina 2009 case involving Turkish vessels illegally fishing in Algerian waters. Four Algerians — including the ministry’s secretary general — and five Turkish fishermen were sentenced to prison terms and fined €80 million.

ICCAT officials contend that enforcement has increased significantly, including its deployment this year of observers on all purse seiners fishing in the Mediterranean. But the observers complain it is almost impossible, standing on ship decks, to provide an accurate estimate of catches, according to an evaluation report commissioned by ICCAT. They must instead rely on the crew’s estimates, and on video footage that vessels and farms often do not provide.

This lack of reliable data has a direct impact on marine scientists who are trying to assess the state of the declining bluefin stock. “We don’t know how much we know, so we can’t even put bounds on the uncertainty,” said Justin Cooke, a fisheries population mathematician hired by the environmental group WWF.

Based on the data he has seen, Cooke believes that purse seining should be suspended in the Mediterranean until a better assessment can be made. But when ICCAT members meet in Paris this month to decide the future of the fishery, they will hear a different story. ICCAT scientists have decided to recommend a fishing quota of up to 13,500 tons annually through 2013, despite their own admission that the data they use to assess the bluefin stock has “considerable limitations.”

The European Commission’s Damanaki — newly installed and widely seen as a reformer — says she is determined to do anything needed, including supporting a fishing moratorium, to protect the fishery.

“Not because we love fish more than fishermen,” she quickly clarified. “But if there are no fish, there will be no fishermen.”

Miranda Patrucic, Brigitte Alfter, David Donald, Martin Foster, Leo Sisti, Fred Laurin, Traver Riggins, Scilla Alecci, and Gul Tuysuz contributed to this story. A companion documentary, “Looting the Seas,” produced by ICIJ and London-based tve, appears on BBC World News on November 6-7, 2010.

Part I: A Mediterranean feeding frenzy

2011-09-30T15:28:26-04:00

Cobblestone walkways line the quiet canals of Sète, a French community of 40,000 nestled along the Mediterranean about 85 miles west of Marseille. It is a picturesque place, bounded on one side by Mount Saint Clair and the other by the clear turquoise water of the sea. But there is more to this seemingly sleepy tourist town.

Anchored in the harbor are dozens of multimillion-euro fishing boats — vessels that comprise the world’s most productive tuna fishing fleet, with 36 vessels targeting the prized, and increasingly at risk, Eastern Atlantic bluefin tuna. Fed by ravenous demand in Japan, Mediterranean fishing fleets — led by those in Sète — have fished out as much as 75 percent of the Eastern Atlantic bluefin. Half of the stock, say scientists, has disappeared during the past decade.

If there is a ground zero in the controversial trade in bluefin, it is here in Sète. The port’s captains are steeped in generations of bluefin fishing — a regional vocation that predates the time of Christ. Their great-grandfathers emigrated from southwestern Italy — most from the same fishing village of Cetara on the Tyrrhenian Sea. As bluefin grew in popularity and price, the captains of Sète topped the hierarchy — the richest, most well-connected fishermen in France.

But Sète’s fishermen suddenly find themselves under unaccustomed scrutiny. So decimated are stocks of bluefin that regulators are considering a moratorium. Prosecutors are dissecting captains’ records, looking for evidence of fraud and fishing beyond legal quotas. Even their biggest buyers in Japan are starting to verify the source of the bluefin they’ve bought for years with no questions asked. “Everyone cheated,” acknowledged Roger Del Ponte, one of the bluefin captains under investigation who denied the charges pending against him. “There were rules but we didn’t follow them.”

The captains of Sète are not alone. For more than a decade, southern Europe’s fishermen went on a feeding frenzy with help from an emerging cast of North African and Turkish affiliates. Widespread fraud and a lack of official oversight have fueled a massive black market, in which, at its peak, between 1998 and 2007, more than one in three bluefin was caught off-the-books, according to an investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

Through dozens of interviews with fishermen, divers, ranchers, enforcement agents and ministry officials, plus additional information gleaned from inspection reports, internal regulatory data and court files, ICIJ’s reporting shows a decades-long system of deceit, lack of oversight, and outright fraud. There is plenty of blame to go around. The illegal and negligent activity extends across the supply chain, ICIJ found, from fleets, through ministry offices, to boardrooms in Japan, which buys 80 percent of the Mediterranean’s bluefin tuna.

Officials looked the other way while fishermen violated official quotas at will and engaged in questionable practices that included misreporting catch size, piloting illegal spotter planes, catching undersized fish, and plundering tuna from North African waters where international inspectors are refused entry. An illicit market even arose in trading quotas — when regulators finally started enforcing the rules — in which one vessel sells its nation’s quota to a vessel that had overfished.

The size of this black market in bluefin is enormous. ICIJ ran an analysis of the illegal and unreported trade, based on scientists’ estimated catches, Japanese market prices, and official quotas (the limits issued to countries on how many tuna they can catch). Our findings: between 1998 and 2007, the off-the-books trade generated an estimated $4 billion in revenue.

An unaccountable industry

Concern over huge catches of bluefin led to discussion in 1992 about including the fish alongside pandas on the list of endangered species banned to international trade. Officials skirted the threat, and later introduced national quotas. Responsibility for enforcement lay with the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), a Madrid-based regulatory body, and with its 47 member states and the EU. But ICCAT members voted for high quotas that its own scientists warned were unsustainable,and failed even to enforce those, industry and official sources say. Meanwhile, fleets of increasingly powerful, government-subsidized vessels have for more than a decade scooped up between 50,000 and 60,000 metric tons annually — nearly twice as much tuna as ICCAT quotas allowed, and three times what scientists in recent years deemed sustainable.

Years of mismanagement led independent auditors of ICCAT in 2008 to condemn its member countries for having “failed to abide by their legal obligations…failed to conserve bluefin tuna and failed in the eyes of the international community.” But their dramatic call for the immediate closure of bluefin fishing and ranching was ignored.

Through government subsidies, French fishermen built up the Mediterranean’s most powerful fleet of purse seine vessels, which use an efficient method of bluefin fishing with nets that close from below like a draw-string purse. Along with Spain and Italy, the three countries cornered the lion’s share of quotas. Greece, Malta, and Cyprus also fished under EU quotas, bringing the EU total to more than 130 purse seiners. Turkey, operating outside the EU, ran a dilapidated fleet of another 56 purse seiners, while Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia sold EU fleets entrance into their rich unregulated waters in exchange for a cut of the catch.

To account for their fleet’s massive overcatch, until 2007 French officials in Paris at season’s end adjusted the actual catch downward when they reported to the European Commission, which in turn reported to ICCAT, according to industry and government officials. The Italian and Spanish fleets also violated their quotas with impunity. “Within the bluefin fishery, all the countries were lying, it wasn’t just France,” ICCAT scientist Jean-Marc Fromentin said. “It was everybody. The only country to give their real figures would get fined, so in that kind of game, everyone lies.

“The officials didn’t respect the quotas, they didn’t control it,” Fromentin went on. “And at the same time, they authorized new boats to be built. So capacity increased. After a few years, the situation became really critical and we started talking about a risk of collapse.”

Set up to fail

For decades, the market for bluefin remained modest and largely regional — in fact bluefin was used in the United States largely for cat food. All that changed in the 1980s, as Japanese demand for fatty toro tuna exploded and sea ranches — large coastal pens for fattening the fish — began to provide a steady year-round supply. Manuel Balfegó, a Spanish fisherman and rancher, recalled the acceleration of his craft in the ‘80s when Japanese and Koreans vessels discovered the rich bluefin fishery in the Balearic Sea off Spain’s eastern coast, where he now ranches tuna for Japanese buyers. “There were so many fish, no one knew what to do with them all,” he said. One tuna trader recalls those golden years in the early 2000s buying fish off the Spanish coast. By strategically stacking the tuna, they could fit 50 into a single freighter truck.

The booming export market combined with government subsidies by the EU and its member states — €26.5 million to vessels in Sète alone — to spur the renovation and expansion of Europe’s bluefin fleet. By 1998, the average French purse seiner was twice as long and four times as powerful as in 1970. By 2008, the EU fleet bloated under the capacity of 131 purse seine vessels. Another 500 such ships outside the EU — sailing under other ICCAT member flags — were registered to catch bluefin. One of the most successful fishing masters said a vessel needed to catch 250 metric tons of bluefin a year to make a profit.

With too few controls and too many ships, the bluefin hunters fished with abandon. ICCAT records show member countries caught about 30,000 tons of bluefin in 1991 — the equivalent weight of three Eiffel Towers. Five years, later that figure topped 50,000 tons — a level that continued through 2007 — three times what ICCAT’s own scientists said was sustainable.

ICCAT instituted the first quotas in 1998, just as Spanish and Croatian fishmongers were revolutionizing the industry with “tuna ranches” in the Mediterranean. Instead of fishing small bluefin close to shore, killing them immediately and returning to port, vessels transferred live fish from their nets into cages, and then slowly towed the bluefin away to be fattened. Ranching allowed vessels to fish farther from port without fear their catch would rot. The deeper the waters, the bigger the fish. And Japanese buyers loved big tuna. Because operations are largely underwater, ranching made it nearly impossible to verify the size or number of fish caught, or how much they weighed. The advent of the ranches, coupled with widespread lack of enforcement, facilitated a decade that fishermen refer to as “the Jungle” — a Wild West in which bootlegged bluefin became business as usual.

The Jungle: 1998-2007

“We always fished more than the quota. No one told us to stop.”

The techniques fishermen used to increase their catch — and profit margins — were described to ICIJ by a dozen veteran bluefin fishermen. Fleets openly fished illegally undersized tuna, used banned spotter planes to search for spawning schools, and transferred tuna onto refrigerated vessels slated for Japan without declaring the catch. If a company was taken to task, the fine in the European Union averaged a mere 1/2,000 of the profits, according to an EU auditor’s report.

“We always fished more than the quota,” explained French Captain Vincent Caci, who gave up fishing this year because of growing restrictions on the trade. “It was normal. No one told us to stop. And France helped us build expensive new boats.”

In neighboring Spain and Italy, fishermen also encountered a similar lack of oversight.

“The fishermen were like guerrillas,” said Spanish fishing master Balfegó. “There were no individual quotas, only country quotas. So we fished, and we declared. The one to blame for the overfishing in the end was the country.”

In 2004, Nicolas Giordano, a fourth generation fishing captain from one of the most prominent bluefin fishing families in France, caught 1,200 tons of bluefin on his own. “Everyone fished as much as they wanted,” he said. “Until 2006 we declared what we wanted to declare. And the government said, ‘Okay.’ The administration didn’t do its job, and at the time no one took it seriously.”

By 2006, environmental groups had succeeded in drawing attention to the plight of the plundered tuna. Under growing public pressure, ICCAT that year launched a 15-year plan to rebuild stock by reducing quotas and increasing the minimum catch size. But the limits outlined were still twice as high as ICCAT’s own scientists recommended.

Ironically, subsidies continued to pour into the EU fishing industry at a rate of more than €800 million per year, with more vessels looking for fewer fish. Between 2005 and 2007 alone, the European purse seine fleet doubled in size.

In spite of its shortcomings, the ICCAT recovery effort carried political pressure to enforce the rules. But as the industry finally drew scrutiny, fishermen and ranchers colluded more closely to launder their wares, industry sources say. Patrick Mameaux, a longtime diver aboard French vessels, whose job it was to count the fish, recalls once fighting over figures with another diver who declared only half of the 80 tons of fish caught. Such tricks became commonplace. Mameaux said often divers would allow fish to pass undetected by stopping their videotape during the transfer from net to cage — an ICCAT requirement to confirm catch size. A prominent French fishing captain said an easier way was to carry a copy from an earlier — and smaller — catch. The diver would feign recording but turn in the pre-recorded tape.

As threats of enforcement mounted, fishermen say, French vessels took in extra cash selling their portion of the national quota in Malta and in Turkey, a country with a big but decrepit fleet and a disproportionally paltry quota. The scam, termed “paper quotas” proved especially helpful for captains who failed to catch enough fish during the season. Paper quotas work two ways. One vessel can “sell” its quota directly to another vessel, taking credit for fish actually caught by another nation’s vessel. Or, a vessel can sell its overcatch to a ranch, which finds a second vessel that is below quota to declare those fish — for a price.

Matters reached a head in 2007, when France — whose official quota that year was about 5,500 metric tons — declared nearly 10,000. The blatant disregard of the quota, combined with growing reports warning of a possible collapse of Atlantic bluefin stock, prompted French authorities to open a criminal investigation. It is the first time, say French officials, that the industry has been put on trial.

The Montpellier case

Fifteen miles from Sète, in the regional capital of Montpellier, a legal drama is playing out that has shaken France’s bluefin tuna industry. Under investigation are six of that nation’s most prominent bluefin fishermen, whom prosecutors suspect of failing to declare their full catches and selling their quotas to foreign vessels that had overfished their own quotas.

Two cases are working their way through the French legal system — one from 2007, another from 2008 — and they remain in a stage of secret pre-trial investigations. The cases, however, can be described from interviews with government sources, prosecutors, and fishermen who say they are the targets of the probe.

To prosecutors, the cases offer a rare window into how fraud infected the very heart of the bluefin industry. “From the moment a person commits fraud, when he fills out false documents, then there is absolutely no way to control the fishery,” said French prosecutor Patrick Desjardin, who recently took over the investigation. After three months of digging through sales records, tax documents and catch declarations in 2008, investigators identified nearly a dozen potential defendants. More than two years later, only six have been formally charged, although Desjardin said he has recently asked that the judge file charges against at least three other men.

While the potential punishment could reap prison time, the defendants will likely receive no more than a fine, Desjardin said.

In interviews the fishermen argue that the practices were so widespread — and enforcement so lax — that to single them out is unfair. “It’s like driving down the road,” said Del Ponte, one of the defendants. “If I know there are no police, I’m going to speed … They didn’t care, then all of a sudden, Boom!”

“Enforcement went from zero to 150,” said André Fortassier, another defendant, who denies he failed to report some of his catch in 2007.

One of the defendants, Généreux Avallone, is the son of Jean-Marie Avallone, widely reputed to be France’s most powerful, well-connected fisherman. Prosecutor Desjardin said he has asked the judge to consider charging three others from Avallone’s company.

The company’s spokesman, Joseph Salou, vehemently denied that the company knowingly broke the law and said he is unaware of anyone other than Généreux being investigated.

“If the ministry had done its work, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”

The fishermen enjoy the sympathy of officials familiar with France’s laissez faire enforcement. “The fishermen aren’t as much to blame as the ministry,” said one source close to the investigation, referring to the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries in Paris. “They just profited from the system. The ministry let them do it. If the ministry had done its work, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”

Interviews with past and present French officials, as well as industry sources, indeed suggest a wide-ranging lack of accountability.

For years, for example, the Sète Office of Maritime Affairs gathered catch declarations when fishermen came to port — but did nothing with them. “There was simply no requirement to send along the information to Paris,” said one ministry official with close knowledge of the events. “So [they] collected the declarations but never did anything with them. Never calculated the catches.”

Scientists declared the French catch figures to the European Commission in those first years. But when France was criticized for overfishing, the Fishing Ministry demanded it be the office to report official figures. An ICCAT official recalled the occasion. “They got called out as the bad guy, but everyone was cheating,” he said. “France was just the only one to be open about it. So they did like everyone else and in the coming years, they cheated too.”

Joseph Salou, who represented the bluefin industry for years before going to work for the Avallone group, recalled when France declared overfishing its quota in late 1990s. “I can’t tell you the criticism we suffered,” he said. “We were denounced by the Spanish and the Italians, who cheated even more than we did.”

Over the years, the ministry’s director of Marine Fisheries in Paris was in constant contact with industry representatives, Salou explained. After each season, the industry and officials discussed catch data, and settled on an official figure. “It was a collaboration,” said Salou, who participated in the talks. “It was a discussion we had every year, the administration and the industry, because the administration was also complicit … The final decision was made by the director of fisheries, who said, ‘Okay, we’ll declare this number.’”

In France, responsibility for the bluefin industry ultimately leads to the Ministry of Agriculture and Fishing in Paris, under which the Department of Marine Fisheries operated. The Ministry, however, appears most reluctant to answer allegations that its officials doctored catch data — data that were then passed on to the European Commission and ICCAT. Ministry officials have not responded to a dozen written requests and numerous telephone calls from ICIJ requesting interviews or comment. Two former directors and a former minister also have declined to comment.

Jean-Marie Aurand was the Marine Fisheries director in charge in 1999 when his office took over reporting final catch figures to the European Commission. Today Aurand is the Ministry’s secretary general, one of its highest-ranking officials. He did not respond to multiple requests for interview or comment.

One official familiar with the annual discussions said it would have been difficult to believe that the Ministry’s director of fishing — and his superiors — did not know the situation. “They would have had to be deaf and blind,” he said. “There was a need to keep an important economic sector alive. There was also a need for the authorities not to risk being sanctioned by the European Commission.”

Knowledge of such blatant violations of overfishing, the source added, would also have been hard to miss by officials at the European Commission, who forward the final EU catch figure to ICCAT. “The Commission isn’t deaf,” he said. “By comparing the data, they could see the discrepancies between reported and actual catches. And people talked, so we knew when a season was lucrative.”

In a show of apparent outrage at the 2007 overfishing, the French Fishing Ministry demanded an investigation. After three months, investigators submitted a report detailing allegations of illegal acts by the country’s biggest bluefin fishing companies. The report also requested authority to investigate official complicity in allowing the overfishing to go on for so long, said a government source close to the investigation.

One ministry official involved with the catch data said he expected investigators to knock on his door and demand to know why he and others had done nothing to stem the illegal overfishing. “People at the ministry at the time knew that if the police did their job, sooner or later they would be asking about the government’s role,” he said.

But that visit never came.

A lack of enforcement

International condemnation of France’s role in plundering bluefin spurred the EU fisheries regulators to snap to attention. But fishermen were slow to believe the rhetoric about a crackdown.

“No one thought we were really going to have to respect the quota,” French fisherman Nicolas Giordano said. “They said, ‘We’ll fish what we want and we’ll see what happens.’”

In 2008, ICCAT introduced the Bluefin Tuna Catch Document Scheme (BCD). The European Commission has praised the program, promising that “documentation of every stage in the chain, including transhipping, caging, harvesting, importing, exporting and re-exporting” would help “ensure complete and reliable traceability.”

Under the BCD system, vessels are given a unique number for each catch. That number follows the catch to ranch, through harvest, and finally to market. All along the supply chain, players are required to provide detailed information about the number, size, and location of the fish.

The system has not worked as planned. No one within ICCAT’s compliance committee has analysed the database, according to committee chairman Christopher Rogers. He said the database had too many limitations — such as countries that still had not turned in documents from 2008, although the regulations require reporting within five days.

ICIJ gained access to the internal database through an ICCAT country member and conducted its own analysis. The analysis found that the tracking system is full of holes. During 2008 and 2009 reports on more than three quarters of all purse seine catches — which make up about half of the overall catch — are missing information that would enable one to verify their legality.

In more than a dozen ranches, many more fish were being sold than could be accounted for, according to the database. In more than 130 cases — accounting for 715 tons of bluefin — vessels reported catching hundreds of fish at a time, with a mean weight at the minimum legal size. That would mean either all the fish were exactly the same weight, or many were under the legal limit to balance those over the limit.

ICIJ asked Rogers if he had ever heard complaints about the minimum-sized catches. Rogers said cases like these have caused raised eyebrows in Japan. “They’re saying, ‘Hey, your numbers seem to be doctored. It appears to us these entries were manufactured to fit the rules.’”

While fishing companies widely ignore ICCAT’s new system, questionable practices persist at sea, suggesting the Wild West of bluefin fishing has yet to be tamed. The EU's Commissioner on Maritime Policy reported in a 2008 annual report that eight Italian vessels had overfished their quota that year and eight planes were found to have been illegally cruising for tuna. Officials from the EU’s inspection arm, the Community Fisheries Control Agency (CFCA), reported 55 suspected violations in 2008. The following year suspected violations jumped to 92 — many for failing to transmit satellite position, which is used to assure that vessels are fishing within legal areas. Italy was by far the top offender, with 68 of the alleged infractions. Croatia, China, and Algeria did not transmit vessel locations during the entire fishing season. Many more vessels were out of inspectors’ reach, fishing in national waters like those of Libya, which, despite being an ICCAT member, does not welcome EU inspectors.

By September this year, the CFCA had detected more than 50 suspected violations. The agency can add one more to its list: in October an Italian fisherman from Cetara was caught with 500 baby tuna weighting an average of just one kilo each.

How bad is the situation? It’s difficult to know because a culture of secrecy has permeated oversight. Despite repeated ICIJ requests, officials at national ministries, the CFCA, the EU, and ICCAT all have refused to make public any records regarding suspected violations or their agencies’ enforcement actions.

“I can understand there is a need for transparency here,” European Commissioner for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Maria Damanaki told ICIJ in an interview. “If any case is complete you should have the full data.” The Commission, however, has denied us access to even those records.

The response buttresses concern expressed by independent auditors from both ICCAT and the EU about secrecy and lack of enforcement. “Procedures for dealing with infringements do not support the assertion that every infringement is followed up, and even less that it is subject to a penalty,” the 2007 report by the EU Court of Auditors noted. Fisheries management organizations “must find a way to be more inclusive and open in their culture,” read a scathing 2008 ICCAT review.

The new players

Meanwhile, a new cadre of players has emerged in North Africa. The 80-degree waters off Libya’s coast — a perfect feeding ground for spawning bluefin — have long attracted French vessels, whose owners have made deals with Libyan companies. Captain Jean-Marie Avallone made one of the most prominent deals, building a partnership in the early 2000s with Ras Al Hilal Marine Services — a prominent Libyan company widely reported to be controlled by President Moammar Gadhafi’s son, Saif al Islam. Sète’s leading fishing companies followed suit.

The Libyans care little about inspections, fishermen say. French Captain Vincent Caci described local inspectors as young and uninformed about tuna. When a catch would come in, one inspector simply asked Caci how many tons to write down for his report.

“They didn’t care about the fish,” he said. “They just cared about the money. They never asked us how much we fished.” Officials in Europe really don’t know to what extent Libya is — or is not – enforcing the international regulations. The same goes for Tunisia, which overfished its quota in 2008 by more than 300 tons but took no actions against its vessels.

Meanwhile, in Algeria this year, ranking officials of that country’s Ministry of Fishing were convicted of trafficking in illegal tuna, influence peddling, and tax evasion during 2009. Four Algerians — including the ministry’s secretary general — and five Turkish fishermen were sentenced to prison terms and fined €80 million.

But it is Turkey that officials say now shows the most flagrant disregard for ICCAT rules. “The massive fraud today is being committed by the Turks,” said one French maritime investigator. ICCAT scientist Fromentin faulted the combination of the country’s tiny quota and bloated fleet.

“The Turkish fleet doesn’t seem to follow the rules,” French inspectors reported in a diplomatic dispatch after repeatedly stopping Turkish vessels last year. “Their registration documents are not complete, or don’t exist at all. They don’t carry ICCAT observers on the purse seiners, or in some cases aren’t even registered with ICCAT.” In one case involving a Turkish fishing and ranching company, inspectors found the number of fish caught was underestimated by a factor of ten.

Turkey, like the North Africa states, is an ICCAT member, but with the black market trade in tuna moving across the Mediterranean it may be hard to stop the plundering of bluefin without a far more serious — and comprehensive — crackdown. Commissioner Damanaki — a Greek national — has met with Turkish officials to discuss their compliance. She hopes that, coming from the region herself, she’ll be more convincing.

“I am coming from a Mediterranean state,” she explained with an apologetic shrug. “So I can say — in the Mediterranean, compliance is not our strong point.”

Kate Willson is a staff writer at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Jean-Pierre Canet is a French producer and director of the documentary Global Sushi. Marina Walker Guevara and Scilla Alecci in Washington, Marcos Garcia Rey in Madrid, Leo Sisti in Milan, and Brigitte Alfter in Brussels contributed to this report. Data analysis by Kate Willson and David Donald.