News / Black fish skippers could be refunded
THE SKIPPERS fined hundreds of thousands of pounds last year for landing black fish at Shetland Catch and other fish factories could be in line for a refund, according to reports in the Sunday Herald.
The paper reports that Fraserburgh father and son Ernest and Allan Simpson, who skipper the pelagic trawler Christina S, won a court case against the Scottish government at Edinburgh’s Court of Session last week.
As a result the two men expect to be awarded several hundred thousand pounds because the court agreed that the government did not follow due process when it allotted restricted quotas to the fishermen in the wake of the scandal.
Their legal victory could prompt a string of similar claims from other fishermen involved in the case, as the government followed the same procedure in each case.
The case surrounds the decision in 2007 by the Scottish Executive Environment and Rural Affairs Department (SEERAD) to cut the fishermen’s quotas by the amount they were suspected of having landed illegally.
The Simpsons spent four years trying to get the government to produce the evidence of how they reached their estimates, but were refused.
When they were finally convicted, it was for a lesser amount of fish than the government had calculated.
The two men were fined £65,000 each and ordered to return £700,000 in illegal income.
Lord Uist last week concluded that SEERAD (now Marine Scotland) had breached the principles of natural justice and the European Convention on Human Rights.
He said: “The petitioners were not provided with the full evidence on which the decision was based, and so were not given an opportunity to comment on or contradict it, before the decision was made.
“In my view it follows inevitably from that, that the decision was not reached in a fair manner. The failure of the respondents to give the petitioners the opportunity to see and challenge the evidence against them was to the material prejudice of the petitioners and in my view vitiates the decision reached.”
The Herald reports Michael Wells of the Alistair Dean Law Practice in Edinburgh, who acted for the skippers, as saying: “The door is clearly open now – This is potentially significant.”
The government has said it is considering how to respond to the decision.
A total of 13 Shetland pelagic skippers were fined hundreds of thousands of pounds in February last year after they admitted being part of an “industrial scale scam” to land fish illegally.
They were all forced to forego quota to make up for the fish they were alleged to have landed outside of the quota system.
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