A Crown Court judge ordered Newlyn fish auctioneers W. Stevenson and Sons to pay nominal fines of £1 each for 45 specimen charges this week - replacing the conditional discharges he imposed at a sentencing hearing last month.
Judge Philip Wassall had attached the conditional discharges to a confiscation order of £710,220 against the Stevenson partnership at Exeter Crown Court on 17 June.
The confiscation order - an amount the Stevenson partnership had benefited from its criminal activities in 2002 – still stands.
This new judgement at Plymouth Crown Court was not as a result of any appeal, and happened under something known as the "slip rule" which enables legal mistakes to be rectified.
At the 17 June Stevenson partnership sentencing hearing it was unknown to both the judge and lawyers that an Appeal Court judgement, which ruled a confiscation order under the Criminal Justice Act 1988 could not be attached to a conditional discharge, had been made just days before.
This ruling marks the end of a long running prosecution resulting from a Marine and Fisheries Agency investigation into the activities of various fishing vessels operating out of Newlyn harbour in Cornwall.
The scam involved disguising landings of valuable quota species like hake, sole and monkfish and cod by describing them in the records as non-quota fish like turbot and ling.
The Stevenson partnership provided an outlet for this black fish thorough its Newlyn auction. It attempted to cover up what it was doing by falsifying its own sales records to match the false declarations made by the masters of the vessels.
