Boat Owners File Lawsuit Against Big Tuna Canners
A lawsuit seeking $850 million in damages has been filed against the three major U.S. tuna canners by 31 independent boat owners who charged the companies with conspiring to monopolize the industry and destroy the American tuna fleet.
According to the complaint filed Thursday in U.S. District Court here, the canners conspired to keep the price of tuna paid to U.S. fishermen artificially low, while buying cheap foreign tuna.
Named as defendants are Pittsburgh-based H. J. Heinz Co., manufacturer of Star-Kist tuna; St. Louis-based Ralston Purina Co., which markets Chicken of the Sea tuna through its subsidiary Van Camp Sea Foods Co., and Honolulu-based Castle & Cooke Inc., maker of Bumble Bee tuna.
“Together they fixed the price they were going to pay for tuna,” said Maxwell Blecher, a Los Angeles attorney representing the boat owners. “The canners are doing quite well. The retail price for tuna keeps going up, while the wholesale price is going down. That is not a natural economic phenomenon.”
Blecher charged that his clients also suffered when the three canners pressured tuna brokers not to sell tuna caught by independent boat owners to, for example, Italian canners.
According to Blecher, the companies threatened to stop buying the brokers’ fish if they did not stop selling to the Italians.
The suit charges that the three companies began conspiring during the 1960s to monopolize the tuna industry and now control two-thirds of the tuna sold in the United States. The California boat owners’ financial losses began mounting four years ago, when the owners started closing canneries in San Diego, Terminal Island and San Pedro.
The complaint alleges that the only canneries now available to West Coast and other independent American tuna boat owners are in Puerto Rico and American Samoa.
According to U.S. law, American canneries are available only to U.S. boats but Asian boats are being allowed to unload their catches in American Samoa, the complaint charges.
Blecher said that, as economic losses mounted for the boat owners, many of them agreed to sell an interest in their boats to the canners. Blecher said that the boat owners now cannot meet expenses and that canners have begun to take possession of the vessels.
The complaint alleges that repossessed vessels worth $8 million to $10 million are being sold to Ecuadoran and Venezuelan tuna fishermen for as little as $1 million each by the canners.
“And then they (the canners) turn around and buy cheap tuna from the South American fishermen,” Blecher said.
The suit charges the big canners with violating U.S. antitrust laws, but Blecher declined to outline the extent of the alleged conspiracy or to specify how competition and trade have been restrained. Blecher said specific examples of the alleged violations will be provided at trial.
Most of the boat owners--which include some corporations--represented in the lawsuit are based in San Diego. But others are out of the country, including in Puerto Rico and Bermuda.
Spokesmen for the three tuna canning companies said they had no comment on the case.
