MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Claims of hake licensing “irregularities” in Argentina

A report from the University of Buenos Aires, UBA, on 25 years of fisheries licensing with the identification of serious “irregularities”, and which apparently has disappeared, has been requested by a Justicialista Senator from the province of Chubut.

According to the fisheries magazine "Puerto", Senator Marclo Guinle has demanded the Executive branch of government a copy of the report that was contracted in late 1999 when the former president Fernando De la Rúa took office in an attempt to assess the true situation of Argentine fisheries following a decade of "excessive licensing" and an almost collapse of the Hubbsi hake resource.

The UBA twelve men team of lawyers and naval engineers looked into licences going back to 1975, including 600 awarded in 2000, and their final 35 pages report with 62 cases of "serious irregularities" plus another 35 cases of which information never was available, found its way to the then Director of Fisheries Horacio Rieznick.

The irregularities included from ghost companies, non existent projects to licences from smaller vessels transferred to big trawlers.

According to the article published in "Puerto", the idea was to send the report as a background to begin an official judicial inquiry, pressing charges against those involved in alleged irregularities. However the second quarter of 2001 was the start of the end of De la Rúa administration and under Economy Minister Domingo Cavallo, an old Fisheries Department hand from the early nineties, Mr. Marcelo Regúnaga and his advisors were back. Mysteriously, the UBA report disappeared and all the judicial presentation interrupted.

Senator Guinle is also requesting information on the procedure to "re-licence" 509 fishing vessels in November 2001, and which includes several of those vessels claimed to be in breach of "serious irregularities".

Actually the UBA report was a direct consequence of the new Argentine Fisheries Law, approved in 1998 with ample Congressional consensus, and targeted to make the licensing system more transparent and fair, based on conservation and resource sustainable principles, and therefore the need to review all existent licences.

But the long arm of the "licensing club" was still present even as late as in the first months, early 2002, of the current administration of President Eduardo Duhalde.

Deputy Fisheries Secretary Daniel García was unable to find the UBA report copy, and other documents in his office and had decided to call the Attorney General and National Auditing Office. Mr. García never had time. "Puerto" reports that a presidential decree removed him from the post thanking him for his services.

The magazine also points out that the contracting of the UBA report in 1999 by the De la Rúa administration was parallel with the decision to impose strict hake catches restrictions.

From the time of excesses, between 1992 and 1996, when according to the UBA report hake catches jumped from 374,000 to 597,500 tons annually, far beyond all scientific recommendations, in 2001, the Argentine government imposed a strict maximum of 210,000 tons.