Saving Seafood

Former BASE auction employees implicate owners in Carlos Rafael scandal

February 26, 2021 — Two former employees of the Buyers and Sellers Exchange (BASE) in New Bedford, Massachusetts, U.S.A. have alleged that the owners – brothers Raymond and Richard Canastra – were aware of and involved in falsifying quotas performed by the “Codfather” Carlos Rafael.

Rafael pleaded guilty in 2017 to falsifying fish quotas, tax evasion, and conspiracy in the wake of allegations he was connected to a criminal fishing scheme involving the evasion of fishing quotas and the smuggling of profits to Portugal. Following the criminal case, a civil case brought by NOAA ensued, which Rafael settled in August 2019.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Blue Harvest CEO expects 15 Rafael vessel deal to close within weeks

January 14, 2020 — Now that their only competitor has dropped out of the bidding, Keith Decker, the CEO of Blue Harvest Fisheries, expects to close his company’s deal for 15 of Carlos Rafael’s groundfish vessels in the US port of New Bedford, Massachusetts, within the next few weeks, The Standard-Times, the community’s local newspaper, reported Friday.

“At this time, no, I don’t see any further impediments to closing the transaction,” he reportedly told the newspaper, adding that Blue Harvest plans to keep the vessels in New Bedford.

Undercurrent News broke the news on Jan. 8 that Richard and Raymond Canastra, the founders and owners of the Buyers and Sellers Exchange, New Bedford’s main seafood auction, have withdrawn their offer to acquire the vessels and their related permits.

The Canastras, back on Dec. 20, attempted to use a “right of first refusal” rule in New England’s Sector VII, which gives members of the greater  Northeast Sector Service Network — including BASE — 30 days to match any offer for vessels by companies or persons from outside the network, jumping ahead of Blue Harvest and its $19.3 million bid made on Nov. 21. The Canastras said they planned to sell the boats and their permits to individual harvesters in New Bedford. However, the two brothers said they lost their financial backers when Blue Harvest filed a lawsuit, on Dec. 23, in a Massachusetts state court.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Canastras: Backers for Rafael vessels withdrew after Blue Harvest lawsuit

January 9, 2020 — Richard and Raymond Canastra say the reason they withdrew their $19.3 million offer to buy 15 of Carlos Rafael’s groundfish vessels, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, is because the lawsuit filed by Blue Harvest Fisheries scared off their backers.

Undercurrent News broke the news Wednesday morning that the Canastras, the founders and owners of the Buyers and Sellers Exchange (BASE), New Bedford’s largest seafood auction, were ending the fight which has served to divide the New England fishing community.

The two brothers did not immediately respond to requests by Undercurrent for an explanation. On Thursday, however, they answered with a press release sent by Cassie Canastra, BASE’s director of operations, and the daughter of Raymond Canastra.

“It was not BASE’s intention to acquire and own these permits and vessels for BASE’s long-term ownership,” the statement reads. “In fact, it was quite the opposite.”

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Bregal’s Blue Harvest set for 15 Rafael vessel deal after Canastras withdraw offer

January 8, 2020 — Richard and Raymond Canastra, the founders and owners of the Buyers and Sellers Exchange (BASE), the seafood auction in New Bedford, Massachusetts, have withdrawn their offer for convicted former commercial fishing mogul Carlos Rafael’s 15 groundfish vessels, essentially giving the boats and their related permits to Blue Harvest, Undercurrent News has learned.

The details are as scant as the three sentences contained in an email sent by one of the attorneys to the others involved in the highly contentious fight to acquire the vessels, a copy of which has been obtained by Undercurrent News.

“BASE has provided notice to the Rafaels that they are not moving forward with the transaction. Blue Harvest is free to complete the transaction with Rafaels. Kindly forward a stipulation of dismissal of the Blue Harvest matter,” reads the email.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

MASSACHUSETTS: US auction owners seek to spoil Blue Harvest’s deal for Rafael groundfish vessels

December 26, 2019 — Carlos Rafael’s remaining fleet of as many as 35 groundfish vessels and skiffs in the US port city of New Bedford, Massachusetts, may not be under Blue Harvest Fisheries’ Christmas tree after all.

Richard and Raymond Canastra, the founders and owners of the Buyers and Sellers Exchange (BASE), a nearly 26-year-old seafood auction house, also in New Bedford,  informed the members of New England fishing sector 7 on Friday that they are taking advantage of the group’s right of first refusal (ROFR) rules to seek acquisition of the vessels and their related permits, Undercurrent News has learned from its sources.

Additionally, the Canastras have filed another challenge to Rafaels’ earlier sale of six scallop boats and their related permits to Quinn Fisheries, a longtime New Bedford-based scalloping company, this time in federal court.

Undercurrent reported late last month how documents showed Blue Harvest, a US scallop and groundfish supplier backed by New York City-based private equity Bregal Partners, had signed a purchase agreement to buy the Rafael fleet and all of their associated permits for nearly $25 million. The deal includes millions of pounds of quota for at least eight types of fish in the northeast multispecies fishery, including cod, haddock, American plaice, witch flounder, yellowtail flounder, redfish, white hake and pollock.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

US auction owners seek to spoil Blue Harvest’s deal for Rafael groundfish vessels

December 23, 2019 — Carlos Rafael’s remaining fleet of as many as 35 groundfish vessels and skiffs in the US port city of New Bedford, Massachusetts, may not be under Blue Harvest Fisheries’ Christmas tree after all.

Richard and Raymond Canastra, the founders and owners of the Buyers and Sellers Exchange (BASE), a nearly 26-year-old seafood auction house in New Bedford, Massachusetts, informed the members of New England fishing sector 7 on Friday that they are taking advantage of the group’s right of first refusal (ROFR) rules to seek acquisition of the vessels and their related permits, Undercurrent News has learned from its sources.

Additionally, the Canastras have filed another challenge to Rafaels’ earlier sale of six scallop boats and their related permits to Quinn Fisheries, a longtime New Bedford-based scalloping company, this time in federal court.

Undercurrent reported late last month how documents showed Blue Harvest, a US scallop and groundfish supplier backed by New York City-based private equity Bregal Partners, had signed a purchase agreement to buy the Rafael fleet and all of their associated permits for nearly $25 million. The deal includes millions of pounds of quota for at least eight types of fish in the northeast multispecies fishery, including cod, haddock, American plaice, witch flounder, yellowtail flounder, redfish, white hake and pollock.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

MASSACHUSETTS: Senate hopeful Lindstrom visits the New Bedford fishing industry

August 30, 2018 — The New Bedford fishing industry rolled out the red carpet Wednesday for Beth Lindstrom, one of three Republicans locked in a primary battle to see who will go up against incumbent Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Lindstrom’s first visit to the fishing industry was arranged by Saving Seafood, a Washington, D.C.-based industry advocacy group founded by New Bedford native Bob Vanasse.

The half-day-long visit began at the BASE seafood auction on Hassey Street, owned and operated by Richard Canastra. There, buyers and the general public can watch as fish are auctioned off electronically, a far cry from the old system of chalk on a blackboard.

Lindstrom, former executive director of the Massachusetts State Lottery, mainly asked questions and listened to fishing industry representatives who told her of the difficulties they have with federal regulations.

An added concern, they said, is the pending construction of huge offshore wind energy farms that they say will keep fishing boats at bay to avoid the risk of entanglement.

The case of Carlos Rafael, known as The Codfather, was also brought up because of the hardship that the government imposed on fishing boats in sectors 7 and 9 and on-shore services who weren’t involved in Rafael’s misdeeds. Rafael is serving a 46-month federal sentence on charges including conspiracy, false labeling of fish, bulk cash smuggling, tax evasion and falsifying federal records.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

New Bedford Standard-Times: Time for NOAA and Sector IX to strike deal

February 20, 2018 — Eighty New Bedford groundfishermen.

They’ve had no work now for almost three months.

In the end, those are the guys and it is their families who are paying the biggest price for Carlos Rafael’s longtime conspiracy to falsify fishing records and smuggle the cash overseas.

But since Rafael was the big guy on the New Bedford waterfront, the guy who owns the majority of the boats in Sector IX, the fishermen have been out of work since Nov. 20 when regional NOAA administrator John Bullard ordered the sector to stop fishing.

Bullard said that Sector IX has not accounted for the overages their group racked up while Rafael was mislabeling more than 700,000 pounds of fish. He has also argued that the reorganized sector has not enacted better enforcement provisions to prevent a repeat of the criminal activity.

For their part, Sector IX’s lawyer, Andrew Saunders, points out that Rafael was able to engage in his wrongdoing because he controlled both the fishing boats and was also the fish dealer (Carlos Seafood). That is no longer the case because all fish caught by Rafael’s boats must now be processed at the Whaling City Seafood Display Auction.

Saunders further pointed out to NOAA that the agency is aware that it is virtually impossible for Sector IX to determine the overages while the IRS is in possession of Rafael’s records until the start of the next fishing season in May. Still, in a Dec. 20 letter, Saunders, wrote NOAA that the sector is working to compile accounting for the misallocations of fish.

Complicating the whole scenario is who is going to control Rafael’s groundfish and scallop boats going forward as the federal judge has ordered him out of the commercial fishing business. Richard and Ray Canastra, owners of the display auction, have offered Rafael $93 million for 42 fishing permits and 28 boats, a deal that would keep the fishing effort in New Bedford, and the 80 fishermen employed. Not to mention all the New Bedford fishing supply and seafood processing operations that are dependent on Rafael’s fleet.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

 

John Sackton: Claims of 300 Job Losses Due to Sector IX shutdown Are Overblown

January 19, 2018 — SEAFOOD NEWS — Frequent claims that the NOAA action against Sector IX for failure to comply with its operational permits have cost New Bedford 300 jobs are simply not true.  The figure being bandied about is based on an economic model, and it inflates the impact of this short term action.

Economist Dan Georgianna created the 300 lost jobs number by looking at the volume and value of what sector IX vessels delivered to the Whaling City Display Auction during the one month from Nov. 20th to Dec 20th 2016, and assumed that if the sector was still operating, they would land the same amount this year.

Georgianna first assumes that the four vessels seized by the court had quotas that would be immediately transferred to other operating sector IX vessels. This is a unlikely assumption, as NMFS has the power to approve or disapprove such transfers, and they have emphatically said they will not permit sector IX to continue business as usual without restitution for fishing violations. In the real world, no one would count on such vessels continuing to provide an economic return.

But the 300 jobs figure also seems aimed at pressuring NOAA to take a more lenient position regarding the operational permit of sector IX.

Here too, the math is dubious. For example, Georgianna says the sales impact of the shutdown is approximately $5.6 million, which is thought to represent about 49 jobs involving harvesters, processors and wholesalers in New Bedford, with the majority of these jobs being harvester jobs

This is a good estimate. But then, Georgianna relies on a Michigan state visitor spending survey for restaurant multipliers, and also includes his own estimates of retail multipliers, and using these models says that the loss of restaurant and retail jobs is much greater. He claims that the number of restaurant waiter, chef and supermarket jobs lost due to the Sector IX shutdown is around 250 jobs.

No restaurant worker got laid off because the owner couldn’t get fish from sector IX. Same thing with Retail. In both cases, the restaurants and retailers simply replaced the product they could not get from Sector IX with other product, including seafood not from New England.

So this loss of 250 jobs is largely fictitious, and certainly is not something that could possibly have happened just in New Bedford, or just in New England.

The actual fair disposition of permits following Sector IX’s failure to monitor illegal fishing remains a complex issue for NOAA, but it certainly is not helped by a public campaign by New Bedford officials claiming 300 job losses in their city, when in fact the real number is around 50, most of whom are harvesters working on the vessels that are shut down because of violations by their Sector.

For those who want to judge the numbers for themselves, here is a link to the report.

This story originally appeared on Seafoodnews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

 

Study: 300 jobs lost in first month of NOAA groundfishing ban

January 17, 2018 — NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — Nearly two months have passed since NOAA imposed a groundfishing ban on Carlos Rafael’s fleet. Those within the Port of New Bedford estimate it’s put upward of 80 fishermen out of work.

That number only scratches the surface according to a study done by SMAST professor Dan Georgianna.

Within the first 30 days of the ban, Georgianna estimates that across the Northeast 300 jobs were lost, with an income loss of about $5.7 million. When including the retail loss, the number surges to $12 million.

“They’re estimates, but I think they’re pretty good estimates,” Georgianna said.

The numbers include all those linked to Rafael’s vessels: fishermen, those working at the port handling Rafael’s landings, like lumpers or cutters, restaurants that once served Rafael’s fish and even the grocery stores that supplied his vessels with food for trips.

Georgianna performed the study at the request of Mayor Jon Mitchell, after NOAA banned groundfishing for Sector IX in November. Sector IX is comprised of Rafael fishing vessels. The ban represented NOAA’s penalties lobbied against Rafael.

Georgiana said he was not compensated for the study.

He used a model developed by NOAA to estimate the economic effects on harvesting grounfish, including supplying and maintaining the vessels, processing and wholesaling. He also used a model developed by Michigan State University to estimate the retail effects.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times