Saving Seafood

Salmon purchasers net $85 mln settlement in U.S. price-fixing case

May 26, 2022 — Six international seafood companies have agreed to pay $85 million to resolve antitrust claims over an alleged conspiracy to fix the price of Atlantic farm-raised salmon, the plaintiffs’ lawyers said in a proposed settlement filed on Wednesday.

Direct-purchase class plaintiffs including Euclid Fish Co in Ohio and New Jersey’s The Fishing Line LLC alleged in claims first filed in 2019 in Florida federal court against leading Norwegian companies and others that they paid artificially inflated prices for farm-raised salmon and related products, including fillets and smoked salmon.

The defendants included Norway’s Mowi ASA, the world’s largest fish farming company.

In settling the case, the plaintiffs said they faced “significant hurdles” since the alleged misconduct “occurred years ago and often involves personnel whom defendants no longer employ.” Lawyers from plaintiffs’ firms Podhurst Orseck and Hausfeld said in court filings they represent a settlement class with 800 members.

Read the full story at Reuters

EU pleads with US judge to limit discovery in salmon price-fixing class-action lawsuit

July 21, 2021 — The European Union has not issued any public comment regarding its antitrust investigation into Norwegian salmon farmers for more than a year, but on 13 July, it made clear its inquiry is still active.

In a brief filed in the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Florida, the European Commission contended that a class-action suit filed on behalf of U.S. purchasers of Norwegian farmed salmon in 2019 is interfering with its investigation. The lawsuit accuses Mowi, SalMar, Lerøy Seafood, Grieg Seafood, and Cermaq Group of exchanging competitively sensitive information among themselves, with the aim of artificially controlling the price of farm-raised salmon sold in the United States.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Appeals court hears Chris Lischewski’s claim of judicial error

June 17, 2021 — Former Bumble Bee Foods President and CEO Chris Lischewski formally appealed his conviction for leading a tuna price-fixing conspiracy in front of a three-judge panel on Wednesday, 16 June.

Lischewski’s appeal is centered around an argument that District Court Judge Edward M. Chen, who oversaw the case, gave incorrect instructions to the jury. In Wednesday’s hearing, Lischewski’s lawyer, John D. Cline, called the jury instructions given by Chen erroneous and confusing, which could have made the difference in what he called a “very close case.”

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Ken Worsham, Scott Cameron avoid jail time, concluding tuna price-fixing case sentencings

April 28, 2021 — Former Bumble Bee Foods executives Kenneth Worsham and Walter Scott Cameron were each sentenced to three years’ probation for their roles in a conspiracy to fix the price of canned tuna sold in the United States between 2011 and 2013.

Both were sentenced by Judge Edward M. Chen of the Northern District of California on Wednesday, 28 April, and both received more lenient sentences than typical for the level of crimes to which they pleaded guilty because they served as key witnesses in the U.S. government’s case against former Bumble Bee Foods CEO Chris Lischewski, who is currently serving a 40-month prison sentence. Former StarKist executive Stephen Hodge also served as a witness in the U.S. government’s case against Lischewski, and received leniency in a non-custodial, probationary sentence issued by Chen in January.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Chicken of the Sea nearing two price-fixing settlements

April 19, 2021 — Chicken of the Sea is nearing two settlements in civil litigation launched against it in relation to its role in fixing the prices of canned tuna.

The El Segundo, California, U.S.A.-based company and its parent firm, Thai Union, have agreed in principle on two separate agreements with those who claim to have overpaid for tuna it sold between 2011 and 2015 – allegations that stem from a criminal case in which Chicken of the Sea served as a whistleblower.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

“I just did the job” – StarKist’s Stephen Hodge explains role in price-fixing scheme

January 22, 2021 — Stephen L. Hodge says he’s sorry for his role in the price-fixing scandal that has rocked the U.S. canned tuna industry, resulting in massive fines for two of the companies involved, including his former employer, and a prison sentence for one of the scheme’s leaders.

Hodge, a former senior vice president of sales for StarKist who testified on behalf of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) in the criminal price-fixing cases against StarKist, as well as Bumble Bee Foods and former Bumble Bee President and CEO Chris Lischewski, avoided jail time in his sentencing, which took place 13 January.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

How America’s Canned Tuna Industry Went Belly Up

August 18, 2020 — This story is about the canned tuna business and the three big companies that dominate it. It’s a story about price fixing, and it’s a saga so dark and disruptive those companies are still reeling from it, facing bankruptcy, legal action, even prison time. It’s a story that upended a century-old industry—but if you ask Cliff White, executive editor of the news website SeafoodSource, he’ll tell you there’s way more at stake than just business: “Price fixing is absolutely wrong, especially for a product that people depend on. That’s the difference between them eating dinner and not eating dinner. That’s canned tuna. We’re not talking about bluefin toro that’s served at Nobu.”

Tuna has been eaten all over the world for thousands of years. In the United States, it was at one time a food mostly associated with immigrant communities—Japanese Americans who fished it in the waters off California, or Italian Americans who’d grown up eating bluefin from the Mediterranean. What turned it into a universal staple was a new technology: canning.

Anna Zeide, founding director of the food studies program at Virginia Tech, explains: “Right around the turn of the 20th century is where you start to see a really focused effort on the part of early tuna canners to build an industry. Canned tuna has this really meteoric rise from being a very marginal food that very few people ate in the early 20th century to being an embodiment of canned food and American processed food by the 1950s and ’60s.”

Read the full story at Slate

Exclusive: Chris Lischewski offers a warning to seafood CEOs

July 1, 2020 — Chris Lischewski is the former president and CEO of Bumble Bee Foods. Earlier this month, Lischewski was sentenced to 40 months in prison and given a USD 100,000 (EUR 88,000) fine after a jury found him guilty of conspiracy to fix the prices of canned tuna sold in the United States from 2011 to 2013.

SeafoodSource: Unless your testimony was misunderstood, you swore under oath that you were not part of any conspiracy to fix the prices of canned tuna while you led Bumble Bee. Do you stand by that statement? And if so, is that an indictment of the numerous individuals who swore under oath that you had been a leader in the purported conspiracy?

Lischewski: I did swear under oath that I would tell the truth, which is exactly what I did. Only two witnesses – [Walter Scott] Cameron and [Ken] Worsham – testified that I was a leader in the purported conspiracy. That testimony – given in return for a favorable sentencing recommendation by the government – was false. Shue Wing Chan of Chicken of the Sea testified that he had an unspoken “understanding” with me not to promote aggressively. But he admitted that the “understanding” existed only in his own mind and that I never told him that I shared it. As I testified at trial, whatever may have been in Chan’s mind, I had no price-fixing “understanding” with him of any kind.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

IWMC World Conservation Trust: Response to Price-Fixing

June 22, 2020 — The following was released by the IWMC World Conservation Trust:

On Tuesday, Chris Lischewski, the driving force behind the creation of the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF), received a three-year prison sentence in the United States for fixing the price of canned tuna. The former CEO of Bumble Bee Sea Foods is now disgraced beyond recovery.

The story behind this one-billion-dollar price fixing scandal, the biggest and most outrageous industrial subterfuge since Enron, is complex. It involves a web of opportunism and mixed agendas. And what still needs to be exposed is the role of NGOs in facilitating this mega crime.

ISSF lives on even though three of its corporate founders, StarKist, Bumble Bee Sea Foods and Chicken of the Sea, have been found guilty of conspiring to cheat American consumers out of the benefits of competition. Separately, another founding member, World Wildlife Fund (WWF), is being investigated for funding, assisting, and/or turning a blind eye to rape, murder and/or terrorism in Africa in pursuit of its fortress conservation crusade.

On the surface, it made absolutely no sense for tuna producers to get into bed with WWF’s satellite ISSF. In 2010, WWF orchestrated a proposal at CITES COP15 to list bluefin tuna in Appendix I. If it had not been inept at managing its relationship with the European Union, WWF might have succeeded or at least come close go destroying the industry altogether. In the wake of this near disaster, tuna producers were expected to mount a counter offensive, perhaps even withdraw from ISSF. Instead, in what seemed like a tactical blunder on his part, Lischewski promoted the virtues of collaborating with WWF, ISSF and the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), which was another WWF creation.

Read the full release here

In a rare outcome, former Bumble Bee CEO will be sent to prison for price-fixing

June 17, 2020 — The former chief executive officer and president of Bumble Bee Foods, LLC, one of the world’s largest producers of canned tuna and other seafood products, has been sentenced to 40 months in jail for his leadership role in a three-year antitrust conspiracy to fix the prices of canned tuna. Christopher Lischewski’s sentence, which also includes a $100,000 criminal fine, comes after a San Francisco jury found him guilty in December of helping to orchestrate the scheme, which also involved the StarKist and Chicken of the Sea companies.

“The conduct was deliberate, it was planned, it was sustained, over a three-year period,” said Judge Edward M. Chen, according to reporting from Seafood Source. “This was not a rash act of having to commit a crime under distress, under episodic circumstances as we see sometimes, this was a contemplated and deliberate plan.”

Moreover, he said, the scheme targeted poor people.

Read the full story at The Counter