THE black market in fish is not new. In April 2005 two men were convicted of running a £3.4 million scam in the Shetland Islands.
John Duncan, 57, a millionaire, and Jerry Ramsay, 51, a neighbour, admitted illegally landing more than 7,600 tonnes of mackerel and herring over two years.
Industry sources said then that the illegal trade was worth as much as £100 million a year in the UK alone, and individual fishermen admitted it could be difficult to avoid involvement with a black market that could undercut prices and bypass regulations.
George Hosie, a merchant from Aberdeen, said at the time: “You try to keep legitimate, but, when you have got staff and bills to pay, you get sucked in.”
The European Union’s response was tighter legislation across its member states. Regulations introduced last September mean that, in Britain, buyers and sellers of fish have to register with Defra, and report the details of every transaction.
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These rules have made trading in illegally caught fish — particularly that from EU waters but outside permitted quotas — more difficult, and industry groups said yesterday that black market fish is a far less significant problem than it was a year ago.
Barrie Deas, of the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations, said that it had been “pushed to the margins”. He added: “As a result the price of fish and of quotas has gone up significantly since the regulations came in. If fish is being brought in from Norway that is bad news for bona fide fishermen because it pulls prices down.”
Bertie Armstrong, chief executive of the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation, expressed similar surprise at the claim. “We don’t see it going on,” he said.
Trying to assess the amount of UK black market fish was “like trying to take into account how much heroin is on the streets”. He added: “Any large-scale importation would have to go through processors and that door had been shut by the regulations.
“I have no knowledge of it and, if I did, I would be telling someone. Life is bad as it is without being tarred by the same brush as people who are doing something we can’t — organised criminal importation.”
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John Adams, spokesman for the National Federation of Fishmongers, said that he had heard nothing about fish coming illegally from Norwegian waters, adding: “I keep my ear to the ground. The vast majority of our members buy fish from markets, where it has passed the point where it would be identifiable as black market. We have to trust the middlemen, who buy it from the boats, that it is legally caught.”