A group of fishermen convicted of breaching fishing quotas during last year’s “black fish” operation are in line to receive millions of pounds in damages because the Scottish Government failed to follow due process, the Sunday Herald has learned.
Around 20 herring and mackerel fishing skippers — a large number of the Scottish fleet — were last year fined and forced to return money running to hundreds of thousands of pounds each for their parts in “black fishing” in the early 2000s. This saw thousands of metric tons of fish illegally landed and channeled through three warehouses in Peterhead and the Shetlands.
But the money is now set to start moving in the opposite direction after two of them — Fraserburgh father-and-son team Ernest and Allan Simpson, who share a boat called the Christina S — won a case in the Court of Session in Edinburgh against the Scottish Government last week. They are each expecting to be awarded damages of several hundred thousand pounds.
