The Civil Guard has arrested 62 people for the illegal shellfish fishing poached in contaminated water. The investigation has been carried out in a joint international operation with France and Portugal, coordinated by Europol. Specifically in Spain, 19 of these arrests have been made and, in addition, eight other companies in the sector have been investigated.
As explained by Benemérita in a press release, they have been seized a total of 30 tons of mollusks and six tons of elvers for a value greater than 10 million euros on the black market.
Risk of causing food poisoning
These criminal organizations traded mainly Japanese clams on the black market, highly appreciated by consumers. To do this, they falsified the documentation of these mollusks collected in contaminated areas to present them as suitable for human consumption.
Subsequently, these copies were sold directly to hotel establishments to avoid the purification processes required for their sale, thus They reduced costs and obtained greater profits.
Although the majority of the recipient companies were located in Spain, all the mollusks came from poaching shellfish on the coast of Portugal, specifically from restricted and prohibited fishing areas due to the high concentrations of contaminants in their waters.
The possibility of absorption of these, through the process of natural water filtering by the mollusk in its feeding process, entails an obvious risk for public health, since the continued consumption of contaminated mollusks can lead to risk of serious diseases such as hepatitis.
Investigations uncovered that some of these criminal organizations were also trafficking elvers in Portugal, Spain and France. This led to the discovery and dismantling of a major criminal network dedicated to poaching, harvesting and illegal smuggling of elvers.
Most of the poachers came from Asian countries and they charged one euro per kilo of fished mollusk. In the seafood market, this product fetches up to 25 euros per kilo, thus linking for the first time in the European Union the criminal activities of human trafficking and labor exploitation with crimes against the environment.
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