'Black fish' scam skippers fined

24 February 2012 Last updated at 08:34 ET

The skippers illegally landed mackerel and herring at the Shetland Catch factory in Lerwick

Seventeen Scottish skippers who took part in the UK's biggest fraud involving illegal catches of fish have been fined a total of £720,000.

The men had admitted they were able to sell vast quantities of mackerel and herring by evading EU quotas.

Scales at the processing firm Shetland Catch Ltd were set to underestimate the weight of the fish being landed.

Six more skippers, from Peterhead, have also admitted their part in the black fish fraud, worth almost £63m.

They are still to be sentenced, along with four others.

Two other Scottish fish processing factories were involved in the scam. One of them, Alexander Buchan Limited, in Peterhead, was fined £240,000 at the High Court in Glasgow.

The 17 fishermen, who were sentenced at the High Court, illegally landed mackerel and herring at the Shetland Catch factory in Lerwick over a three year period, between January 2002 and March 2005.

They offloaded thousands of tonnes of fish, much more than they were allowed under European rules to protect stocks.

The court has heard how logbooks were falsified and digital weighing scales at the factory were rigged.

In Peterhead, at the Fresh Catch factory, fish was pumped ashore through underground pipes.

Fisheries officers and police raided the factories in 2005 after an investigation into the companies' accounts.

Sentencing the 17 skippers, 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".

The seventeen men have already been forced to pay back nearly £3m in profits they made from the scam.

24 Feb, 2012

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Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-17153085
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