No public record of who owns majority of industrial fishing vessels, study finds

A new report commissioned by international ocean advocacy group Oceana has revealed a troubling lack of transparency in the ownership of the world’s large-scale fishing (LSF) fleets - prompting campaigners to reiterate calls to make this information public in order to improve fisheries governance.

The research, conducted by EqualSea Lab at the University of Santiago de Compostela, covered almost 7,000 vessels across 143 flag states, or 37% of the world’s registered LSF fleet. The result is the report "Beyond the Flag State Paradigm: Reconstructing the World’s Large-Scale Fishing Fleet through Corporate Ownership Analysis".

According to Oceana, the research shows that nearly two-thirds of LSF vessels operate without any publicly available ownership information, despite industrial vessels accounting for 60% of global marine fisheries landings and receiving over 80% of all government fisheries subsidies.

“The lack of transparency around vessel ownership undermines local fishers’ livelihoods with unfair competition,” said Philip Chou, Oceana’s Senior Advisor, in an Oceana press release. “Without making ownership data public, penalties are ineffective, and enforcement fails because crew members are punished while owners walk free.”

One of the key findings is that more than one in six of the LSF vessels analysed in the research are legally owned in countries different from their flag states, the nation under which a vessel is officially registered.

According to Oceana, this discrepancy allows owners to benefit by obscuring their identities through intermediaries.

"This can reflect a deliberate strategy by the ultimate owner, also called the beneficial owner, of a vessel to hide behind layers of other registered individuals and shell companies in order to lower costs, dodge taxes, or secure additional fishing opportunities. By simply registering in whichever country offers the most lenient rules, bad actors have a greater ability to potentially conceal illegal activities," Oceana contends.

“Big fishing companies are not being held to the same standards as other industries,” said Maisie Pigeon, Director for the Coalition for Fisheries Transparency (CFT), in a press release announcing the report.

“As long as we don’t know who really owns and controls large industrial fishing vessels, governments will struggle to stop illegal activity and make sure fishing rights are shared fairly. It’s time to demand transparency about who’s really behind the big players in the fishing industry," Pigeon added.

The report also points out that many flag states do not currently require beneficial ownership to be declared when vessels are registered, which Oceana argues creates a loophole that weakens accountability and enforcement.

The most frequently used registries by foreign firms to flag LSF vessels include Panama, Belize, and Honduras. While Panama recently pledged at the Our Ocean conference in Busan to increase its use of ownership data in the licensing process, it stopped short of committing to make such data publicly accessible, a key demand of CFT’s Global Transparency Charter, Oceana said.

Oceana and CFT are now urging flag states to require the disclosure of beneficial ownership information upon vessel registration, and to make this data publicly available, with recommendations detailed in a new policy brief accompanying the report.

"To ensure proper oversight, we must move beyond the flag and demand full transparency about who truly owns, controls, and profits from large-scale fishing vessels," Oceana states in the policy brief.