Looting the Seas II from The Center for Public Integrity

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.

Spain’s hake appetite threatens Namibia’s most valuable fish

Namibia — 2012-01-24T20:58:12-05:00

WALVIS BAY, Namibia — Spanish companies are catching an estimated seven of 10 Namibian hakes in what has been considered one of the world’s richest fishing grounds. Despite warnings that the stock could drop further from an already alarmingly low level, the government of Namibia this year increased the quotas for hake catches. Meanwhile, some players ignore the rules entirely and don’t even bother to hide it. José Luis Bastos, a Spanish fishing magnate, was blunt: “We are over-catching hake, and I don’t have a problem telling the [fisheries] minister this.”

Bastos exceeds quotas without fear of harsh punishment because he is among a dozen well-connected Spanish ship owners who control almost all trade in hake, the southwest African nation’s most lucrative fish. Hake, with its mild taste and tight white flesh, is Spain’s most popular seafood.

Namibia, poor and barren, has a coastline that stretches 1,500 kilometers from South Africa in the south to Angola to the north.

As in the rest of the world, where 85 percent of stocks are fished to — or over — their limits, Namibian hake has been caught far beyond sustainable levels. Estimates are that there are only 13 percent as many hake as swam here in the 1960s. And since the decades-old nation exports most of its affordable fish protein, Namibia is increasingly food poor. A third of its two million people live on less than $1 a day and unemployment is estimated at more than 50 percent.

There are a few groups that escape this desperate situation. Among them: The ruling post-revolutionary establishment and fishing magnates like José Luis Bastos.

From his office in the gritty Namibian port city of Walvis Bay, Bastos explains why he’s not concerned about breaking the law. “If they are going to fine me, they must fine me,” he told reporters from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. “I’ll see what I can do about the possible penalties.”

He adopted Namibian citizenship to qualify for fishing rights and is confident he can avoid stiff penalties.

As he speaks, Bastos is surrounded by photos of himself with Sam Nujoma, the once celebrated rebel leader who resisted the racist apartheid regime in South Africa to become founding father and president of independent Namibia.

Though no longer president, Nujoma still dominates Namibian politics. Bastos is his frequent host on hunting trips to his ranch. One picture showed Nujoma with a giant kudu antelope he shot there. Not long ago, the ranch covered almost 250,000 acres in the country’s interior, though Bastos says it is now half that size.

About 10 other Namibian-Spanish joint ventures operate in Walvis Bay. The “Wall Street” of fish is what the locals call the long rows of high-tech processing factories with private docks for landing fish in what is among the world’s best-organized whitefish market facilities. The nearby airport was recently upgraded at a cost of €32 million ($45 million) — half of it paid for with loans from the Spanish government — in an attempt to handle cargo jets so fresh hake can be flown to Europe.

“The Spanish are in the veins of Namibia,” fisheries union leader Daniel Imbili said in his office in Walvis Bay. He said Namibia, with scant market knowledge or resources, has little choice but to go along with the relationship.

The town that is a company

Lüderitz, a 12-hour drive south of Walvis Bay, is the only other real fishing port in the country. The name is a reminder of former German colonizers, but these days Spain plays the dominant role. In 1990, at Nujoma’s invitation, the Spanish company Pescanova set up shop there under the name of NovaNam.

Angel Tordesillas, then-general manager of Pescanova in South Africa, steered several of the company’strawlers to the expanding fishing port. Over the next two decades, Lüderitz grew from a population of 12,000 to 32,000. “We can say that Lüderitz is Pescanova,” Spanish ambassador to Namibia Alfonso Barnuevo said.

The investment in Lüderitz earned Pescanova the gratitude of the new nation. Tordesillas fostered a close friendship with Nujoma, then president. And Pescanova has since maintained a close relationship with political leaders. Today the company is the world’s largest supplier of hake, controlling at least 20 percent of the total quota in Namibia in recent years. It is the third largest seafood company in Europe with 2010 sales of €1.6 billion ($2.2 billion).

Anonymous Namibian interests own 49 percent of NovaNam. The rest is controlled by Pescanova, apart from a two percent share in the company held by its workers.

But it is not a happy operation. Employees repeatedly protest poor working conditions and pay. In January, The Namibian reported, 600 workers demonstrated, claiming they were exploited and subject to “slavery.”

“Everybody is afraid of Pescanova,” union organizer Imbili said. “The playing ground is not equal for all. Tordesillas is very powerful in Namibia because he’s [influencing] the government.”

Pescanova operates the largest fishing fleet in Europe and now processes more than 100,000 metric tons of fish annually, but the company is not communicative. It took 14 weeks and more than 25 phone calls and emails before its director of communications answered ICIJ’s request for comment with an email: “We decline the invitation for interviews.”

Where the power is

Bastos and Pescanova are two sides of a coin that bears the same roots: Spain. That’s where most of the fish are going, and so are the profits.

Companies headquartered in Spain with local subsidiaries control about 75 percent of the hake market, according to estimates by industry insiders. Their catches last year would have brought in about 300 million dollars on Spain’s frozen-fish market.

“The fishing industry is dominated by Spain. That’s not a secret,” said Cornelius Bundje, deputy director of the Namibia Maritime and Fisheries Institute in Walvis Bay. “The Spanish are making a profit, and they take it to Spain and other countries.” Imbili agrees: “Billions of Namibian dollars go to Spain. The money is not invested in Namibia. There is not a value adding for Namibia in the fishing industry. … The wealth is leaving Namibia.”

Even the Namibian Hake Association — traditionally chaired by a Namibian — is headed by a Spaniard: Antonio Marino of Tunacor, a joint venture with the Galician company Pescapuerta. The appointment shows the extent to which Spanish interests have penetrated the Namibian ruling class.

Marino denies that there is undue Spanish control of the local industry.

The key to this situation is access to the quotas. To the casual observer, Namibia’s thriving fishing industry is a model of local empowerment: Trawlers all fly the national flag, and at the sound of the 6 a.m. morning whistle local workers walk past flashy new SUVs parked at the factory gates.

The hake industry alone employs 9,000 Namibians — a fact that’s frequently cited to demonstrate the local benefits. Fisheries control is often lauded by international experts as one of the best in the developing world. But a closer look at the hake fishery reveals more disturbing elements.

Foreign companies, mainly Spanish, benefit from political patronage that arbitrarily and opaquely hands out fishing rights to loyal members of Nujoma’s ruling South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), critics say.

All Namibians are potential fishing rights holders, but the Ministry of Fisheries chooses the lucky ones. In the past ten years, only 38 applicants have received hake quotas. When those holders get their fishing rights, they can sell quotas to the highest bidder, usually a Spanish company.

This system has raised questions before, such as when the former fisheries minister Helmut Angula did not deny owning shares in a company that had seen its hake quota increased by 385 percent.

Quota is allocated on a “need” basis, which means applications often list all kinds of women's groups and marginalized people as shareholders, usually via “development trusts.” This way, empowerment criteria are met but the people whose names are used often never get to see any money, critics say.

“Corruption is a significant component in influencing the allocation of concessions to particular people,” said Namibian fisheries economist Charles Courtney-Clarke. “The Namibian government has been unable to address the dominance of foreign companies in the fishing industry because they [SWAPO leaders] lack a real plan apart from taking advantage of control over resources.”

In a private conversation, a general manager of one of the Spanish fishing companies described how the system works. The Spain-based company owns 50 percent of the local branch; the other 50 percent belongs to Namibian partners. “They have a very high salary per month, but they don’t do any work at all,” he said. “When they pay a visit to our factory, they’re horrified at the smell of hake. But we need them because they are fishing-rights holders. Here we all need this kind of people, for political influence.”

Suso Pérez, another Spanish operator, of Espaderos del Atlántico, said the local partners are figure-heads cashing in on their political alliances. “They’re all members of SWAPO who have no bloody idea about fisheries.”

Fishing to the limit — and over

That Bastos so freely acknowledged overfishing his quota was because, he said, it was simply too low. “We informed the minister that the resources are fine, we are catching in record time,” he said. “We need quantity to be able to survive. I hope that the minister will take that into consideration when they decide the quotas.”

Bastos said that what’s needed is more quota and less competition. In his view, too many things get in the way of fishermen’s bottom line.

Sustainable fishing relies on scientifically based quotas — how much fish you can take without actually killing off the population. But the most common problem in the world’s fisheries is that scientific evidence has not been heeded by politicians and fishermen.

And here Namibia fits into the larger and much direr global picture. The last assessment of world fish stocks from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations concludes that 85 % of world fisheries are fished to their maximum, overfished or depleted.

Namibia became a textbook case of that phenomenon when Spanish trawlers first started plundering hake in Namibian waters in the 1960s. They hauled out so much fish that by the time Namibia won independence in 1990, the stock was only at an estimated 13 percent of its original level.

Since independence Namibia’s rulers have gotten a better grip of the valuable resource. The stock is no longer declining, scientists say, but it’s still a fraction of what it was, and it’s fished to its biological maximum.

Each year, the government-controlled Namibian National Marine Information and Research Centre (NatMIRC) gives advice on biologically acceptable levels of outtake for each fish species. But the fisheries ministry often yields to industry pressure and sets a higher quota, critics say.

“Misrepresentation of statistical information to justify increases in quota is common knowledge,” said fisheries economist Courtney-Clark about local stock assessments.

This spring the scientists at the research center set the biologically acceptable quota of hake to a maximum of 145,000 metric tons for the 2011-12 season, but then the fisheries ministry decided to raise it.

“The minister decided on 180,000 tonnes, probably considering socio-economic factors,” explained Carola Kirchner in an email. She was a stock assessment scientist in the Namibian government for 18 years until she recently resigned. “Whether the stock will sustain catches of this magnitude is questionable. … In my opinion it was not a very good idea. … This will seriously backfire at some stage.”

Kirchner’s assessment is that the stock will decrease again. “They can completely go against the center’s advice. … We have to quietly accept the decisions.”

The ministry acted under significant pressure from industry. In April, almost all hake fishing companies halted operations and laid off workers in protest for what they considered a low quota. “What they are trying to do is blackmail me,” Bernhard Esau, minister of Fisheries and Marine Resources told the Windhoek Observer at the time. Esau did not return calls, emails and written requests for interviews from ICIJ.

In the end, and despite its own misgivings on overfishing the stock, the Namibian ministry of fisheries increased the hake quota by 29 percent above the previous year’s 140,000 metric tons. The increase went against the NatMIRC scientists’ recommendation that “variations in the [quota] must be capped at 10%.”

In their latest stock-assessment report the scientists say that what little is left of the stock is still vulnerable and that “the fishery should be managed by using the precautionary approach.”

One Word: Fish

Ten hours’ drive inland from Lüderitz and the coast lies Namibia’s capital, Windhoek. There Carmen Sendino heads the Spanish Cooperation Office, the Spanish government’s aid organization.

Spain has encouraged its industry’s monopoly of the Namibian hake industry, exchanging a dozen official state visits in as many years to discuss the sector. Spain subsidized the transfer of Spanish-flagged vessels to Namibia and then pressured the government to ignore invitations from the EU to enter into fishing agreements that would allow other European fishing fleets into its waters.

Also, since 1997, the NatMIRC’s research projects have been financed by the Spanish government and the region of Galicia.

The generosity has to do with one thing — the presence of the Spanish seafood companies. Sendino was reluctant to comment on the details in the relation between the Spanish aid and the fishing sector, but she said one word that summarizes it all: “Pesca,” Spanish for fisheries.

Spain has handed out millions of dollars in aid to Namibia — some of it directly to the fishing industry. The last available figures indicate that from 2006 to 2009 Spain’s aid to the country was worth in excess of €50 million ($70 million), according to data from Spain’s foreign affairs ministry.

“Spain is supporting the Namibian government, and they pay back this aid through the hake industry,” said Imbili, the union leader.

According to Peter Pahl, managing director of Namibian-run fishing company Seaworks, the aid and subsidies from the Spanish government are used to lobby on behalf of its companies for fishing rights. “The Spanish government is lobbying Namibia. In this sense, Madrid’s government is being very proactive.”

The Spanish Secretariat for International Cooperation told ICIJ in a statement that the aid is not meant to favor the Spanish fishing companies in Namibia but “to strengthen the Namibian fishing sector,” which represents a quarter of the country’s exports income.

As relationships go, Nujoma’s and Bastos can be said to be fairly close. In his picture-filled office, Bastos confided to us about a favor he is doing for “the old man,” as Bastos usually refers to Nujoma.

“I am building a house for him,” said Bastos, and showed a power of attorney from the former president to deal with the development.

The house will be located on a prime piece of land situated in what is locally referred to as “the Millionaire’s Mile” along Walvis Bay’s flamingo-flecked lagoon.

On parting, Bastos added that he never asked Nujoma for any favors.

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.”

‘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.

IMPACT: Fishing industry rep calls ICIJ investigation an 'explosive cocktail that damages the Spaniards'

Spain — 2011-10-27T18:04:54-04:00

MADRID — The latest investigation of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists is part of an “international campaign against Spain and its fishing industry," representatives of the Spanish fishing industry announced at a press conference held today in front of the Spanish Fishing Secretariat in Madrid.

ICIJ’s investigation published earlier this month in leading international media outlets, including Spain's El Mundo and El País, exposed how the Spanish fishing industry has received more than $8 billion (€5.8 billion) in subsidies since 2000 to expand its capacity and global reach. The analysis showed that nearly one-in-three fish caught on a Spanish hook or raised in a Spanish farm is paid for with public money. That public fortune supports a fleet with an extensive record of flouting regulations and breaking the law. It also spurs the depletion of threatened fish stocks.

After the publication of ICIJ’s investigation, 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 probe into the Spanish fishing industry has also prompted a parliamentary question in the Dutch Parliament and moved Europe’s largest department store, El Corte Inglés, to pull out a batch of more than a ton of mislabeled fish from its shelves. The series is the latest installment of Looting the Seas, an ongoing investigation into the forces that are rapidly depleting ocean resources.

Nine industry groups present at the press conference said they wrote a letter to the Spanish Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, asking for the government’s support. Trade unions initially had been included in the campaign, but those groups were absent from the letter produced by the industry. One trade group announced it did not agree with the campaign's "tone and objectives." A draft of the letter provided to the press does not allege inaccuracy in ICIJ's reporting. Instead, it focuses on some ICIJ’s funding sources – foundations such as Adessium in the Netherlands, Waterloo in the UK and the Oak Foundation in Switzerland. ICIJ is the international arm of the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity, an independent, nonprofit investigative journalism organization. CPI and ICIJ make all their funding information available on their website.

“The figures are tweaked," said Javier Garat, Spain’s main fishing lobbyist and secretary general of the Spanish fishing confederation, Cepesca. "True and false information is mixed in order to have an explosive cocktail that damages the Spaniards.”

When asked to identify inaccuracies in ICIJ’s investigation, the groups did not provide specific examples. Garat said Cepesca is still reading the articles to give a more detailed response. He criticized the inclusion of fuel tax breaks as subsidies.

According to ICIJ’s calculations, since 2000, the Spanish fishing sector has avoided paying $2.7 billion (€2 billion) in taxes on fuel to the Spanish Treasury. Organizations such as the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Bank as well as renowned economists consider this form of public aid a subsidy.

(Read more about ICIJ’s methodology here.)

The industry representatives also criticized recent reports on Spain and EU-wide fishing subsidies by the environmental groups Greenpeace and Oceana.

The European Union is currently revamping its Common Fisheries Policy, a legislation that affects its 27 members and will rule for approximately a decade. At the same time, Brussels officials are determining how much and what types of fishing subsidies to provide the industry. Spain is the EU’s most powerful fishing fleet and has received one-third of all the EU’s direct fishing aid since 2000 –far more than any other member state.

Video: The hake hoax

2011-10-06T08:37:04-04:00

Hake is Spain's most popular fish, but consumers aren't always getting what they think they are buying. A scientific study commissioned by the International Center for Investigative Journalists found that almost one in 10 fish purchased at markets in Spain were mislabeled. This video follows reporters buying the fish and explains why mislabeling can mask bigger problems in the oceans.

Hake DNA testing: How we did it

2011-10-06T00:03:01-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

Between June 9 and 14, ICIJ reporters Marcos García Rey and Mar Cabra purchased 100 frozen samples and 50 fresh samples in the Madrid region of products labeled as: Merluccius capensis (Shallow water cape hake), M. paradoxus (Deep-water Cape Hake), Merluccius polli (Benguela Hake), Merluccius senegalensis (Senegalese Hake), M. merluccius (European Hake), M. australis (Southern Hake), or M. hubbsi (Argentine Hake). Because of time and logistical constraints, ICIJ reporters were unable to sample over an extended time period or outside the Madrid region.

Reporters purchased the frozen samples at the top supermarkets in terms of sales. These are also the markets that carry brands from some of the country’s largest importers of frozen seafood. ICIJ also selected samples from companies that sell bulk fish. According to a study by the Ministry of Environment, Agriculture and Fisheries on European hake, Spaniards buy half of their fresh hake in supermarkets and half in traditional fish markets. Fresh samples were purchased from top chain stores as well as local fishmongers selected randomly within the city of Madrid.

The shopping process was documented in spreadsheets, which contained the following information: sample number, date of buy, name of the shop, address, scientific name indicated, reported origin, frozen/fresh, presentation (whole piece, slice, filet, tail), commercial brand, distributor, ship owner, price per kilo and a field for other notes. This information was later typed into Excel.

The purchase and sampling process was captured on video. Each sample was placed in a sterilized plastic cup filled with 100 ml of ethanol for delivery to Oviedo. Following the recommendations of the researches, the cups had inside a penciled piece of paper with the sample number, which was also indicated with a sticker outside. This way, scientists could do a blind analysis of the fish.

ICIJ paid the University of Oviedo, Department of Biology of Organisms and Systems €1,500 to test the samples and provide a written analysis.

For reference, six hake samples of known origin and species were placed as positive controls in each reaction, as well as a negative control containing only water and PCR reaction mixtures, to exclude any possible contamination of vials and materials.

The extraction of DNA was performed employing a protocol based on resin Chelex. A fragment of each sample was introduced into an Eppendorf tube containing a solution of Chelex100 with proteinase K. The tubes were incubated at 55ºC for 1.5 hours. Finally, the samples were kept at 100ºC for 20 minutes for deactivating the proteinase K. The DNA remains diluted in the supernatant, which is employed for further reactions.

The species-specific DNA marker employed was the cytochrome oxidase subunit I gene.

Polymerase chain reactions (PCR) for amplifying the marker from DNA samples were performed in a total volume of 40 μl, employing the Barcode fish primers described by Ward et al. (2005). The PCR program was: initial DNA denaturing at 95 ºC for 5 minutes; 35 cycles of: denaturing at 95 ºC for 20 seconds, annealing at 57 ºC for 20 seconds, extension at 72 ºC for 30 seconds; final extension at 72 ºC for 10 minutes. The four products obtained after the PCR, which are many copies of the DNA marker, were purified and sequenced by Macrogen Holland using an Automatic sequencer 3730XL under BigDye Terminator cycling conditions. All the laboratory process was repeated employing a new bit of tissue taken from each sample. The results were identical for the two aliquots of each sample and ensure repeatability of the analysis.

To determine the species of a sample, the sequence obtained from the sample was compared with those contained in international databases, including the laboratory’s reference sequences for all Merluccius species in the GenBank, employing the program BLAST within NCBI (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/). Species assignation was made based on > 99% sequence similarity with GenBank voucher specimens Sequence comparison was made independently by two different researchers to ensure reliability of the species determination.

The genetic results were recorded, containing the number of each sample and the corresponding species as authenticated from DNA. Up to then, the researchers had not received any information on the brands or species identified when the fish were purchased. This data was exchanged by email on June 28 at 5 pm. With the complete results, the University of Oviedo Researchers wrote a report analyzing the findings from a scientific perspective.

The mislabeled samples were double checked in a five-step process comparing notes, videos and receipts of the sales.

VIDEO: The new colonizers

2011-10-04T11:55:12-04:00

Namibian officials have been lauded for tight fisheries controls and for stemming the power of foreign fishing companies. But ICIJ has found the system isn't working for hake, Namibia's most valuable fish. Politically-connected Namibians and Spanish companies corner the trade.

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.