COD set for British dinner plates has become the latest commodity to be plundered by mafia-style criminal gangs using consumers as accessories in a growing deep-sea crime.

Norwegian authorities have given warning that illegal cod is being sold throughout Britain, from local fish and chip shops to supermarkets. As much as 50 per cent of the cod consignments arriving in Britain could be illegal.

The scam involves Russian-owned trawlers which operate from the northern port of Murmansk ignoring strict quotas on fishing of cod, red fish and halibut in the Barents Sea.

The legal quota of cod from these waters is 480,000 tonnes a year but it is estimated that the Russian trawlers are over-fishing by as much as an extra 100,000 tonnes a year.

Their vessels are escaping the quotas by offloading their excess stock in international waters on to different ships — usually ones travelling under a flag of convenience, such as Cambodia, Togo, Georgia, Belize or the Cayman Islands.

When the Russian ships return to port they do not reveal the true size of their catch to the authorities, knowing that the quotas are rarely policed. The black fish is distributed and sold as lawful at ports throughout Europe, especially, it is alleged, at Grimsby and Hull.

The gangs operating the lucrative illicit trade cover their tracks by renting or leasing Russian vessels instead of buying them.

Naval officials in Norway accuse the British Government of failing to prevent this multimillion-pound money-laundering racket. Ben Bradshaw, the Fisheries Minister, is being blamed for talking tough on illegal fishing on the world stage but refusing to deal with the problem at home. Norway is demanding that Britain gives full data of all landings of cod and other fish from Russian trawlers or other internationally registered vessels. If it has the data it can work out the extent of the over-fishing by the criminal gangs.

However, the Government is refusing to hand over the information and insists that it will only pass the data back to Russia for its own internal checks.

The Government also declined to answer specific questions from The Times about Britain’s refusal to provide fish sales information to Norway. In a statement Mr Bradshaw said: “We have a good and improving record of fisheries enforcement which is recognised by the European Commission. We have co-operated actively with the Norwegian Government regarding its ongoing concerns about the activities of some Russian vessels. The UK has also taken a leading role internationally in tackling illegal fishing activity through its chairmanship of the High Seas Task Force. We conducted 116 successful prosecutions in England and Wales for fisheries offences last year.”

The World Wildlife Fund International and Greenpeace are campaigning to persuade Mr Bradshaw to take a tougher line against the gangs. They are also urging leading food companies, such as Unilever, Young’s Blue Fresh, Findus and supermarket chains, to boycott fish from UK ports if they wish to guarantee that the cod is legal and from sustainable stocks.

These companies condemn illegal and unregulated fishing and deny knowingly purchasing illegally caught, landed or fished stocks.

However, a spokesman for Unilever, which owns the Bird’s Eye and Igloo brands, admitted: “We can never say with 100 per cent security that someone has not circumvented regulations. The policing of regulations is beyond our remit.”

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