UK Boats That Fish Illegally Are Subsidised By The EU Claims Fishsubsidy.org
Commercial Fishing, Illegal Fishing, News Friday, March 12th, 2010The website which keeps track of subsidies given to UK Fishing vessels has published a list of EU subsidised vessels whose owners have also been convicted of sea fishery offences. UK Registered Boats including : BEN LOYAL, CKS, Admiral Gordon, Admiral Blake, GIRL PATRICIA, CATEAR, DANIELLE, were given subsidies of upto £50,000 by the European Parliament.
Fishsubsidy.org say
“Illegal fishing contributes to the overfishing of valuable fish stocks, many of which are at dangerously depleted levels. Very limited data on convictions for serious infringements of fisheries rules (illegal fishing) and other criminal offences has been compiled from France, Spain and the UK. Unlike data on fisheries subsidies, it is not official data obtained directly from governments but information collected manually from government websites, press reports and court records. It is therefore certain to be incomplete.”
Further Reading
When Crime Pays – How The EU Subsidises Illegal Fishing
http://fishsubsidy.org/infringements
You can read more about this ridiculous situation on the fish subsidy website here. If you would like to comment on this news article please use the comments form below. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
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Then they should be made to give the the handouts back
The headline is a bit misleading. It’s sounds as if it is saying that the EU is giving out subsidies for illegal fishing. Legally I don’t suppose that you would have to make a disclosure that you had any illegal convictions behind you when applying for a grant. I have no idea if the EU have any sort of spent sentencing data in place like we have in this country. For example you can become a registered doorman or security officer with a criminal record as long as your arm for violence. But as long as it happened 7 years ago or more and you are not on any kind of licence referring to your criminal past then you don’t even have to disclose that you have a criminal record. People are protected under the criminal rehabilitation act.
So if they keep no records then I would assume that they wouldn’t have to disclose that they had convictions for illegal fishing regardless as to when it happened.
Tommy
I agree with Paul – They should be made to give the grants back as well as pay any fines etc.
The trouble is, as it appears to me, there is no common sense applied to anything nowadays. Everything can be hidden behind, ‘human rights’, ‘discriminatuion laws’, etc etc.
Checking the stats it appears that most of the penalties for breaking the law are lower than the subsidy itself,….so let’s just keep on repeating the offence and Joe Public can keep financing it! Great or what?
It’s nice to know that the Playa De Arbeyal out of Spain received 631,975 Euro’s in subsidy and then had to pay a fine of 30,000 Euros out of that for misreporting, unreporting and illegal mesh size. Must have really broken the bank and I’m sure they won’t do anything like it again.
Left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing, and those that should and could make a difference don’t care as long as their salary gets paid every month. Then they hide behind legislation once the dirt hits the fan.
But it is ALWAYS Joe Public who foots the bill for all this Euro nonsense.
Bring on the ‘revolution’!