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Seafood Supply Company, Dallas-based wholesaler, was sentenced this month for an imported salmon scheme.<\/p>\n
Dreamstime\/TNS<\/p>\n
Seafood Supply Company, a Dallas-based wholesaler, was sentenced this month to pay a $250,000 fine for a scheme to intentionally misrepresent the origin of its imported salmon to fetch higher prices. The company actually\u00a0sourced the salmon from Chile but passed it off to customers as Canadian, Norwegian or Scottish, according to court documents.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u201cFalsely labeling product harms American consumers and puts companies that follow the rules at an unfair disadvantage,\u201d Matthew Nies, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Justice, said in an email to The Dallas Morning News. \u201cThat\u2019s why we take the issue of false labeling seriously. And we will prosecute those who violate the law.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lesia Hensley, Seafood Supply Company\u2019s president, emphasized that the local wholesaler was attempting to move on from the episode. \u201cSeafood Supply Company cooperated fully with the government\u2019s investigation and this agreement settles the matter for the company,\u201d Hensley said in an email to The News.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Hensley, who took on her role in 2023 \u2014 after the time period that was the focus of the government\u2019s fraud investigation \u2014 also said the company had established new policies \u201cto ensure this does not happen again\u201d and that the fine would not impact the company\u2019s operations. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cHonesty and integrity and the relationships we have built with our customers and suppliers over the last 50 years are vital to our business,\u201d she added. \u201cWe apologize for what occurred in the past.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Dallas wholesaler\u2019s scheme went on from early 2020 through early 2022, according to prosecutors, and mostly involved \u201ca former high-level corporate official,\u201d although other employees were also involved.\u00a0<\/p>\n
To carry out the fraud, the company ordered Atlantic salmon that had been farm-raised in Chile, which is generally cheaper and lower quality than Atlantic salmon raised in Europe or Canada. Then a top employee at Seafood Supply Company, who was unnamed in court documents, \u201cwould make handwritten changes to the handwritten purchase orders,\u201d prosecutors alleged, which would then be used to update [the company\u2019s] electronic inventory records, recoding the internal Chilean salmon product codes into product codes for salmon from other countries.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Seafood Supply Company repeated the mislabeling scheme more than 50 times, according to a court document, and pocketed approximately $200,000 from the price differential. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
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After an investigation by NOAA, in February, the Department of Justice charged the company with two felony counts of false labeling under the Lacey Act, the wide-ranging federal law that relates to animal and plant trafficking and trade.<\/p>\n
Seafood Supply Company pleaded guilty and this month was sentenced by a North Texas federal judge to pay $250,000. The company was also placed on probation for three years and ordered to implement an environmental compliance plan.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The wholesaler, which is based near downtown Dallas, was founded in the 1970s by an Egyptian immigrant who had no knowledge of seafood and got his start by buying a truckload of Alaskan crab and salmon and then selling it to a department store restaurant, according to the company\u2019s website. The wholesaler sells a wide variety of frozen and fresh seafood, including mahi-mahi, tuna, live lobsters, oysters and scallops.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Seafood Supply Company, Dallas-based wholesaler, was sentenced this month for an imported salmon scheme. Dreamstime\/TNS Seafood Supply Company,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":799383,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5135],"tags":[5229,1596,358,290169,342046,3187,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":["post-958225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-america","tag-dallas","tag-texas","tag-tp-dallas","tag-tp-fraud","tag-tx","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/958225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=958225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/958225\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/799383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=958225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=958225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=958225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}