Owner of 2 Firms Faces Charges in Salmon Imports

The owner of two Orange County companies is facing civil penalties and $190,000 in fines on charges that he illegally imported salmon caught by a Taiwanese fishing fleet.

Young Ho Lee, 40, a Korean citizen, and two companies he controls were named in two complaints filed this week by the Department of Commerce in Washington.

Lee allegedly bought the salmon from a Singapore company and routed the shipment through a U.S. port to avoid Japanese laws prohibiting the importation of Taiwanese fish.

Two companies Lee controls, Union Inc., a Costa Mesa food distribution company, and Channel USA Inc. of Fullerton also were named in the complaints. Lee and his companies face 19 counts of allegedly violating a federal law prohibiting the transportation and sale of illegally caught fish.

No one answered the phone at Union Inc. Friday. No telephone number is listed for Channel USA.

The charges stemmed from the seizure of 600,000 pounds of salmon confiscated in July by National Marine Fisheries Service agents in Tacoma, Wash. An informant’s tip led agents of the fisheries service and U.S. Customs Service to a warehouse where they found the salmon. The fish shipment is worth about $800,000, according to William F. Lutton, deputy special agent in charge of the fisheries service northwest region. “There has never been anything of this magnitude,” Lutton said Friday. A hearing on the charges probably will be held in Los Angeles, he said.

The federal complaint alleges Lee purchased the salmon from a company in Singapore and shipped it to Tacoma, Wash., before reshipping it to Japan. That route would circumvent a Taiwanese law prohibiting the export of salmon caught by its fishing fleets. Japanese law also prohibits the import of Taiwanese salmon. Both nations passed the laws under pressure from the U.S. government to protect the salmon population, according to officials of the fisheries service.

Initial tests on the salmon revealed about half were caught in U.S. waters off the coast of Washington and Alaska and the rest were caught in the high seas, according to Rolland Schmitten, regional director of the fisheries service in Seattle.