Some $100,000 of a $150,000 fine paid by a former candidate to be the nation's top fisheries manager who was caught cheating a catch share system in Alaska has been directed to a foundation whose board includes NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco — architect of the nation's catch share policy.
Arne Fuglvog, who agreed to serve a 10-month prison sentence Thursday, was an ardent advocate of catch share management while standing as a candidate to head the National Marine Fisheries Service in 2009. Records now show he had been exploiting the system illegally over a number of years earlier in the last decade, according to published reports in Alaska.
The congressionally chartered National Fish and Wildlife Foundation has been providing funding to Lubchenco's campaign to privatize and commodify the nation's fisheries in the face of a binding vote by Congress last winter to bar new catch share conversions during the fiscal 2011 spending cycle, which ends Sept. 30.
Read the complete story from The Gloucester Times.