MANHATTAN (CN) — The United States government asked the Second Circuit federal appeals court on Wednesday to weigh whether it has a property interest in migratory wildlife on public lands in a case brought against a Canadian-owned fish harvesting and processing operation in the Northern Neck region of Virginia.
Two private U.S. citizens, W. Benson Chiles and Chris Manthey, initially filed the case under seal in July 2021 on behalf of the U.S. government, accusing Canadian seafood conglomerate Cooke Seafood of illegally harvesting from U.S. waters many millions of dollars’ worth of fish to which it was not entitled.
Under the False Claims Act, private citizens can sue companies “qui tam” for defrauding the government and receive a tidy percentage of any recovered damages.
The relators argued that Cooke circumvented regulations of the American Fisheries Act by setting up a sham company in the name of Seth Dunlop, the inexperienced nephew of the foreign company’s CEO, in order to create an illusion of compliance with the requirement that any vessel that fishes commercially in U.S. waters must be owned and controlled by U.S. citizens.
Dunlop was merely a “figurehead,” they argued, because in reality, Cooke and its Virginia-based subsidiary Omega Protein retained de facto control over the fishing vessels.
The complaint, in which the relators sought up to $2 billion in penalties, focused on Omega Protein, which processes menhaden, a small forage fish colloquially known as...
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