Scottish Fishermen Fined For £63m Catch Scam

Seventeen skippers behind one of Scotland's biggest fishing scams have been fined a total of £720,000.

They pleaded guilty along with the operators of three fish processing factories to illegal landings worth £62.8m.

They executed an elaborate scheme to land huge quantities of "black fish" and subvert EU catch restrictions .

In the sophisticated operation, weighing machines were adjusted and hidden pipes used to siphon excess catches away from the gaze of fisheries inspectors.

At one stage, the crime involved half of the pelagic fishing vessels fleet operating out of the North of Scotland. The pelagic boats are the largest and most profitable in the Scottish fleet.

Individual fines ranged from £3,000 to £80,000.

The company Alexander Buchan was fined £240,000 for helping the vessel masters
land the undeclared fish.

Judge Lord Turnbull said the scam was "an episode of shame" for the pelagic fishing industry.

He said it was a "cynical and sophisticated" operation which had the "connivance of a number of different interested parties".

On its return to harbour, a fishing boat's catch is typically handled through processing factories, which prepare it for onward sale and transport.

The factories involved in the crime were Shetland Catch Ltd at Lerwick on Shetland, and Fresh Catch Ltd and Alexander Buchan Ltd in Peterhead.

When inspectors searched Fresh Catch, they found that a underground pipe at the harbourside, used to deliver fish from a boat to the factory, had a hidden 'divert' mechanism.

This was operated by a lever in a portacabin known as the Wendy House. It allowed the factory to divert quantities of fish away from the official weigh scale which would be checked by catch enforcement officers.

When it was known that inspectors were due to visit, staff were instructed to pile fish boxes up against the door to the "tank room" where fish were stored.

Another door to this room had a rope attached to the internal handle to prevent it being opened from the outside and a third door wouldn't open due to a faulty lock. This stopped inspectors from gaining access.

At Alexander Buchan Ltd, information on manipulating its weighing system was detailed in the staff guidance manual. When inspectors called, the managing director confessed to having a "secret scale".

This involved the use of an additional conveyor belt used to transport fish through the factory. All fish should have travelled the full length of a belt which took them past the weighing mechanism, but a portion was deflected onto the additional belt, past the point of weighing. It meant a percentage of fish wasn't recorded as part of the overall catch.

The company told inspectors that, using this method, it was possible to allow up to 70 per cent of a landing to be unrecorded.

Shetland Catch manipulated their weighing scales to provide false weights of landed fish. The computer read-outs shown to fisheries inspectors didn't record the correct amounts of landed fish, but instead showed the true figure with a percentage skimmed off.

The weight manipulation was carried out using a computer in the engineer's workshop. It was a considerable distance from the weighing mechanism in the factory and so unlikely to be inspected by fisheries officials.

The scam was aided by fishing vessel agents who run the financial side of fishing and liaise between skippers and factories. They sent double invoices for each landing, one for the declared landing and another for the undeclared catch.

The Scottish Fisheries Protection Agency called in the accountants KPMG to examine the books of the three factories involved and they discovered evidence of significant declaration of fish. A police investigation then began, called Operation Trawler.

The senior investigating officer, Detective Superintendent Gordon Gibson of Grampian Police , told Sky News: "It was a case of them thinking they could get away with it. They were greedy and some wealthy individuals decided to make themselves wealthier."

As part of the scam, the rogue skippers also pretended the tanks that held fish on board their boats were smaller than they actually were.

Cephas Ralph, of Marine Scotland , told Sky News: "On the fishing vessels, our officers will attempt to make an initial quantification of the fish on board by 'dipping' the tanks.

"Vessels might have six or perhaps nine tanks. They measure the distance from the deck to the top of the mass of fish in the tanks. By consulting a set of tables that show the dimensions of the tanks, they can quantify the amount of fish.

"It became clear that the tables that had been supplied were fictitious. It wasn't until we employed marine architects with laser surveying equipment that we found the true volumes of the tanks was much greater than those that had been declared."

Complex enquiries have taken place to seize the assets of guilty skippers. A team of accountants has worked more than 1,700 hours in following the profit trail the length and breadth of the United Kingdom and as far afield as Norway.

Already, 17 vessel masters have had more than £3m confiscated. They have also had their catch quotas reduced for the past five years.