The Scorpions are investigating a major scam in the fishing industry in which 35 companies are suspected of over-catching their quotas of pilch-ards and other pelagic fish by many thousands of tons.
Bruce Morrison, an advocate with the directorate of special operations (the Scorpions), told Weekend Argus a crack team of investigators was considering laying more than 3 000 charges of over-fishing, bribery, fraud, forgery and uttering false documents.
This is the second major scam in the South African fishing industry investigated by the Scorpions in the past few years.
Hout Bay Fishing Industries, now defunct, was fined R40-million for grossly over-fishing hake and crayfish.
Its chairperson, Arnold Bengis, is serving a jail sentence in the United States for illegally importing crayfish and Patagonian toothfish into the US.
The first public move by the Scorpions in the current investigation was in April when they raided offices in Mossel Bay, seizing 131 computers and truckloads of documents.
"This looks like over-catching on an enormous scale," Morrison told Weekend Argus.
"The forensic investigators are up to their eyes in paper-work and it could take weeks to complete the investigation. This over-catching has apparently been going on for the past three years."
The pelagic industry is experiencing its biggest boom in 50 years, with catches of pilchards and anchovy expected to exceed the half-million-ton mark for the fourth year in succession, according to the fishing journal Maritime Southern Africa.
Huge shoals of pilchards off the southeast coast have attracted the pelagic fleets away from their usual fishing grounds off the West Coast to the area between Gansbaai and Port Elizabeth.
The fish is often off-loaded at Mossel Bay, halfway between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth, to save time and costs. It is then taken by refrigerated truck to the factories on the West Coast and the fishing vessels go back to sea to catch more fish.
But greedy operators have apparently taken advantage of the abundant stocks and new off-loading arrangements by helping themselves to much more fish than the law allows them.
Some companies are said to have landed pilchards at Mossel Bay in the middle of the night, without a fisheries inspector recording the catch as the law requires.
A source has said that trucks are supposed to leave Mossel Bay with certificates showing that the fish has been weighed and inspected by fisheries inspectors. But many trucks left without this certificate, according to Maritime Southern Africa, and "it is possible that truck drivers were in on the scam".
The investigators are apparently comparing records of fish landed legally in Mossel Bay with records of fish processed in the factories. A source said they were finding more fish was processed than was landed legally.
Nobody had yet been arrested and no charges had been laid, said Morrison. But there are apparent similarities with the Hout Bay Fishing Industries case.
There, the Cape Town High Court heard that thousands of tons of crayfish and hake were offloaded illegally at night from a fishing vessel that acted as a courier, collecting illegally caught fish from vessels owned by other companies involved in the scam.
Some companies paid substantial fines after plea bargain agreements and several fisheries inspectors lost their jobs after charges of bribery and corruption were laid against them.
Morrison said the Scorpions were working closely with the fishing authority, Marine and Coastal Management, to stamp out corruption in the industry.