US Appeal Court has described the former Hout Bay Fishing Industries company owner Arnold Bengis, his son David, and US business partner Jeffrey Noll as key players in a sprawling, trans-Atlantic criminal scheme to illegally harvest massive quantities of South African rock lobster and Patagonian toothfish, marketed in the US as Chilean sea bass, and then to sell that illegally harvested fish in the US for a significant profit.
It is said that fishermen working for Bengis caught huge quantities of both West Coast and South Coast rock lobsters in South African waters, way in excess of local legal quotas. When these men feared checking they offloaded poached lobsters at night, under-reported to fisheries authorities, and bribed South African fisheries inspectors. It is also said that once the lobsters were ready for export to the US, false documents were submitted to the South African authorities.
These fraudsters kept two sets of books one for legal amounts of rock lobster, within South Africa’s quota, and the other – “Sheet B” – for the poached animals. According to court when the initial container was seized by the authorities, the men and their co-conspirators “engaged in a series of elaborate deceptions designed to avoid detection and perpetuate the scheme”, including removing wage documents from the Hout Bay premises and shredding financial documents in the US.
