Seafood Solutions Inc., a California corporation, was sentenced in federal court in Los Angeles to pay $1 million in fines and community service payments for its role in the false labeling of frozen fish fillets.
The corporation was fined $700,000 and ordered to make a community service donation of $300,000 to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. The money is to be used to fund projects related to methodologies, databases and other research into the identification of marine organisms.
In addition, the company was sentenced to three years of probation, was ordered to forfeit all remaining inventory of the falsely labeled fish and to develop and implement a corporate compliance plan.
The sentence stemmed from the conviction of Seafood Solutions on July 25, 2011, on a single count of trafficking in fish knowing that the fish had been transported and sold in violation of the U.S. Lacey Act. Specifically, the fish was Pangasius hypophthalmus, a species in the catfish family that were misleadingly labeled as “Paradise Grouper” and “Falcon Baie Grouper.” Seafood Solutions was one of three defendants named in the same charging document.
According to the plea agreements, in approximately June 2004, Seafood Solutions began to sell a fish it declared to customs as “ponga.” The fish being imported as ponga was Pangasius hypophthalmus, a species in the catfish family. The fish was then sold under the brand names, and in boxes labeled in part as, “Paradise Grouper” and “Falcon Baie Grouper.”