Pacific Seafood has been accused of monopolizing the market of Dungeness crab, among others. (Photo: Stock File)

Fishers sue seafood processing giant

UNITED STATES
Thursday, June 24, 2010, 16:40 (GMT + 9)

Two fishers filed a class-action lawsuit against fish processing leader Pacific Seafood Group in the US District Court of Oregon on Tuesday.
 
The fishers’ lawsuit alleges that Portland-based Pacific Seafood's network of 54 companies and owner Frank Dulcich violated federal antitrust laws by monopolizing the four major West Coast seafood markets of Dungeness crab, groundfish, Pacific whiting and Pacific coldwater shrimp.
 
The companies, the filing claims, have combined market shares of 50 to over 70 per cent in those four markets. The filing seeks damages of up to USD 520 million to compensate for seven different types of anti-competitive conduct, reports The Daily Astorian.

Fishers in Astoria, Warrenton and up and down the West Coast have long protested that the monopoly of Pacific Seafood's companies allows them to manipulate seafood prices.
 
"The claims filed against Pacific Seafood are completely without merit,” the company said in a statement. “This lawsuit includes gross misrepresentations and we plan to aggressively defend against the allegations."
 
Pete Leipzig, director of the West Coast trawl fishing group Fishermen's Marketing Association, is only surprised such a suit was not filed sooner.
 
The two representative plaintiffs in the case are commercial fishers Todd and Lloyd Whaley of Brookings. Attorney Michael Haglund, of Haglund Kelley Horngren Jones and Wilder, said numerous other plaintiffs from the Astoria-Warrenton area will serve as witnesses in the case, but their names were left out of the lawsuit filing to evade backlash from Pacific Seafood.
 
Haglund said he found seven categories of violations, including:
 
• Employing strategies to set and impose low prices paid to fishers, including retaliation against competing processors who deviated from those prices.
 
• Theft from fishers via manipulating fish weighing scales and misreporting fish weights.
 
• Acquisition of 18 West Coast seafood-processing plants, sometimes unfairly.
 
• Extensive use of exclusive dealing and tying arrangements, wherein fishers would not be allowed to deliver one species of fish unless they delivered their whole catch to Pacific Seafood Group companies.
 
• Restricting the amount of crab, shrimp and groundfish caught by fishers.
 
• Sham representations to the Pacific Fisheries Management Council that impacted decision-making.
 
• "Dirty tricks," like illegally targeting threatened stocks and fraudulently handling a delayed start to the 2005-6 crab season.
 
The Whaleys are hoping a deluge of commercial fishers follows their lead. The lawsuit is open to more than 3,000 commercial fishers or vessel owners who delivered Dungeness crab, groundfish, Pacific whiting or Pacific coldwater shrimp to Oregon, Washington or California processors between June 2006 and now, reports The Oregonian.

"The whole goal of this case is to stop the battery of illegal anti-competitive tactics that Pacific Seafoods has used, and continues to use," Haglund said. "We want to recover the damages that they've inflicted on fishermen in the last four years, break up this network of companies into smaller units and restore open competition to the seafood industry on the West Coast."

Related article:

- Pacific Seafood Group

By Natalia Real
[email protected]
www.seafood.media

Print