Salmon-Farming Giant Faces Billion-Dollar Lawsuit

"It's pure fraud. It's totally illegal," the plaintiff's lawyer, Brendon DeMay, told HuffPost.

North America’s largest farmed salmon producer defrauded the U.S. government by hiding ownership of a controversial fishing fleet with a history of flouting federal authorities, according to a recently unsealed lawsuit.

The lawsuit adds a new dimension to a longstanding fight over the environmental impacts of aggressively harvesting menhaden from U.S. coastal waters. Conservationists have campaigned for years to limit menhaden fishing in the Chesapeake Bay, arguing that overharvesting the small, fatty fish too close to shore imperils marine wildlife that depends on them, including predatory fish, ospreys, bald eagles, dolphins and whales.

Many conservationists are especially concerned that dwindling menhaden stocks may be playing a role in the decline of striped bass, a species that follows menhaden migrations along the Atlantic Coast and spawns in the Chesapeake Bay. Recreational fishing for striped bass contributes roughly $8 billion annually to the U.S. gross domestic economy, according to a 2019 study by the McGraw Center for Conservation Leadership.

The complaint against Cooke Inc. and its subsidiaries and partners, filed in the Southern District of New York by two individuals on behalf of the federal government, was unsealed in April, but received little attention beyond the trade press. It asks a federal judge to levy fines that could total more than $2 billion.

Virginia is the only state on the Atlantic Coast that still allows commercial ships to net menhaden in state waters in order to process them into oil and feed — a once-common practice in the region, known as “reduction fishing.” Canada’s Cooke Inc. bought Omega Protein, the American company that has long dominated that market, in 2017. Omega Protein also fishes for menhaden in the Gulf Coast.