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A BRIXHAM trawler skipper and his fishing company have become the first to brought to court by the new Marine Maritime Organisation, which replaced the Marine and Fisheries Agency at the beginning of the month.
Stephen Trust and his family run Trust Trawlers pleaded guilty to retaining 77,670 scallops (totalling almost nine tons in weight) which were under the 110 millimetre size limit which applied to the area of the English Channel where he caught them.
They were together ordered to pay a total of £24,000 in fines and costs by magistrates in Torquay. The MMO said the court was told that the Trust Trawlers vessel, the Jacomina, was boarded by fishery protection officers from the naval vessel HMS Tyne five days after it left the fishing port of Brixham in January this year. There they found the undersized scallops. Later checks ashore revealed that more than half the scallops caught on that trip by the vessel were under the regulation size. The magistrates were also told that the scallops would have attracted a price as high as £14,235.
Prosecuting for the MM, Robert Newman said: "Had they been landed that is the price they would have fetched and the amount of money that the company would have illegally benefited from.
Mr Newman said taking undersized scallops affected the fishery stock's opportunity to reproduce which would eventually impact on the local fishery community as a whole.
Trust Trawlers told the fishery officers that there had been a mistake in measuring the gauges used by his crew. The financial penalty was made up of a £4,000 fine, £8,000 in costs and £12,000 for the value of the catch.
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