Cornwall still trades on its romantic past of pirates, smugglers and excise men. When filming a seemingly interminable court case about the landing of “black fish” in the port of Newlyn last year, we drove round the promontory and found ourselves, to some hilarity, faced with two life-sized statues of pirates outside a tourist shop. We had inadvertently reached Penzance.

The smugglers and pirates were long gone by the time Gilbert and Sullivan wrote their comic opera. Indeed, part of the joke was that The Pirates of Penzance was set in what was by then a placid seaside resort. But Cornwall’s isolated position still means it has its modern equivalents of smugglers and excise men and that became all too clear when the seven-year court case about illegal fishing in Newlyn concluded earlier this month. In one of the biggest prosecutions for illegal fishing ever brought by fishery inspectors, the trawler-owning firm of W Stevenson and Sons was ordered to pay £776,000, including costs, for its part in a massive illegal fishing scam during six months of 2002.

The company’s systematic deception involved six owners and skippers of fishing vessels and an auctioneer. They disguised the landings of valuable species such as hake, sole, monkfish and cod by describing them as turbot and ling, or fish for which there were no restrictive quotas. The firm provided an outlet for this black fish through its Newlyn auction and falsified sales records to match the false declarations made by the vessels’ masters.

In all, W Stevenson and Sons pleaded guilty to 45 specimen charges of falsifying fish sales documents, yet the company still dominates the port of Newlyn and the southwest. During the investigation it operated 35 vessels and owned salerooms, auctioneers, fish merchants and fuel suppliers. Elizabeth Stevenson, who represented the trawler-owning family throughout the case, also chaired the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations. Given this was one of the biggest black fish cases in Britain in recent years and a fraud perpetrated by one of the leaders of the fishing industry at a time when 90% of European Union fish stocks are in trouble, you might expect a judge to throw the book at the Stevensons. Wrong.

The sentence gave a very mixed message. Judge Philip Wassall authorised a confiscation order allowing the seizure of £710,000 worth of assets — the amount of profit the firm was calculated to have made by its deceit. However, for the 45 charges admitted by the company, the judge gave a two-year conditional discharge and imposed no punitive fines. To add to the comicality of the case, it now seems he may not have been allowed to give a conditional discharge and may have to impose nominal fines.

Was he right not to punish the Stevensons? Certainly, Cornwall’s fishing industry believes so. Elizabeth Stevenson and the Newlyn skippers put up a defence with as many good lines as a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. A thousand people signed a petition against the use of proceeds of crime legislation — set up to seize the assets of big-time drug dealers and gangsters — to punish fishermen. The skippers argued that if EU rules had been observed, fishermen would have had to throw millions of fish back into the sea, dead.

As the judge said, there was enough quota available to be bought or rented for them to have landed all the fish they caught if they had wanted to. The fishermen had simply maximised their profits by not buying it and by the end of the year the quotas for threatened stocks were overfished more as a result of their deceit.

Last week Elizabeth Stevenson again argued that the boat owners and auctioneers caught in the investigation were not criminals living off the proceeds of crime, although the law says they were. Many will sympathise with her views on the EU’s bankrupt fisheries policy and her shrinking industry’s plight, although this, ultimately, will not do. Nor will the argument that punitive fines would have undermined the viability of W Stevenson and Sons and, by extension, of Newlyn’s fishing industry. This is where I think the judge got it wrong.

The reason was lying in a box the last time I was on the firm’s market floor: a porbeagle shark, critically endangered in EU waters and one of the species of ocean shark last week reported as being threatened with extinction. By continuing to fish after their legal quotas had been reached, the W Stevenson vessels were likely to catch more endangered species such as this porbeagle. What the Stevensons did was indeed a crime for which they should be penalised. The victims are the oceans and fish populations that are the birthright of their fellow citizens.

Fishing in Cornwall faces a choice between the industrial model — represented by W Stevenson’s trawlers and the pair trawlers for bass, with their by-catch of dolphins — and a newer, selective, more sustainable model of fishing, represented by a handline fishery for bass, pollack and mackerel, the last of only a handful in Britain to be independently certified by the Marine Stewardship Council. Which way do we consumers want fishing to go? I think we know the answer. The trouble is that this judgment has made it harder to get there.

Charles Clover is author of The End of the Line, now a documentary film.

See www.endoftheline.com

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