The Great Fishing Caper

A fishing conglomerate created a puppet company to facilitate a merger. It could now be on the hook for billions of dollars. Read the details on this shocking lawsuit.

Did Seafood Giant Violate Law? Cooke Inc., a major seafood company, faces a lawsuit for allegedly violating a law restricting foreign ownership of fishing vessels in US waters. In summary:

• The Jones Act, a law from the 1920s, requires vessels operating between US ports to be US-built and majority US-owned.
• Cooke acquired Omega Protein, a US company with a large fishing fleet, in 2017.
• To bypass the Jones Act, Cooke allegedly created a shell company, Ocean Harvesters, to own Omega’s vessels.
• Ocean Harvesters was set up to appear independent but was actually controlled by Cooke, according to the lawsuit.
• The lawsuit alleges that Cooke used Ocean Harvesters to break fishing quotas.
• If successful, the lawsuit could challenge the dominance of large companies in the seafood industry.