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OPERATION YUYUS

GALICIA, MARCH 2016

Every day Antonio “Tucho” Vidal Suárez gets into his grey Land Rover and drives the short distance from the elegant villa on the hill overlooking Ribeira and down to the harbour. After having visited the fish market he continues to his favourite bar, the Doble SS, an unpretentious establishment with five tables and a long bar. Together with a couple of long-since-retired old salts, he kills a few hours playing cards. Then he ends the day with a coffee while he makes a few business calls at one of the tables outside. “Tucho” has retired, but every time the family convenes to make an important decision, it is still the patriarch who has the last word, the “Mafia fishermen’s godfather”, as some people call him.

“Tucho” doesn’t see what is hiding in the shadows. By the bar a plainclothes policeman is covertly taking photographs of him. The telephone has been tapped, and many of his routine movements are followed by eyes he cannot see. Hidden video cameras have been installed by the entrance to the shipping office. When on the rare occasion he manoeuvres the expensive Bentley out of the underground garage, an anonymous vehicle follows behind him. When he fills the car up with petrol, there is a stranger nearby.

After “The Bandit 6” was chased and boarded in the Southern Ocean, the Spanish minister of agriculture, food and the environment summoned the director of the environmental crime division of the national police force of the Guardia Civil for a meeting.1 They were having problems with a criminal family in the north, she explained.

When the Guardia Civil investigator Miguel and three of his colleagues are put on the case, they know virtually nothing at all about illegal fishing and the Galician fishing mafia’s operations in the Antarctic. But after having consulted with environmentalists, fisheries experts and Interpol, a clear image begins to emerge of who is involved in the looting of the Antarctic. After a few months, the Guardia Civil agents travel to Galicia to take a closer look at the suspects: The Vidal family, Florindo González and Manuel Martínez Martínez. They check the offices and residences of everyone involved and then make a decision.

The first target of Operation Yuyus is the Vidal family in Ribeira.2 They have the most ships and hands down the worst reputation of all. The havoc wreaked by the Vidal family was so blatant and the international pressure on Spain to investigate them so great that it was an embarrassment for the Spanish authorities.

For the undercover police from Madrid, the Vidal family seems more like ordinary white collar criminals than a mafia organization. But who knows, one of the undercover agents thinks, perhaps it will blow up tomorrow?

From endless hours spent on stakeouts they have established that the brothers Manuel Antonio “Toño” and Angel “Naño” Vidal Pego seldom go out for lunch, but instead have homemade sandwiches at the office and that both have an affection for the car make Porsche. “Toño” has a large Cayenne, while “Naño” is most satisfied in the sports model 911. But that is hardly a crime.

For months they have tapped the telephones of several of the shipping company’s employees, but the results have been disappointing. None of the conversations have been about the pirate vessels.

However, the investigators have found informants with detailed knowledge of the Vidal family’s business and register of sins in the Antarctic, and who know where conclusive evidence against the family is to be found. But Miguel wants to hold off on securing this. First, they will launch a full-scale raid on the offices and residences in Galicia.

The investigation remains under wraps until the Guardia Civil starts checking the bank accounts of the Vidal family’s companies in several Spanish banks. A bank employee warns the Vidal family’s financial director that the police are sniffing at their finances. When Guardia Civil picks up on the warning from a phone tap, they decide to move in immediately.

Early in the morning of 7 March 2016, 50 Spanish police officers and two Interpol agents get into their cars. They have with them two tracker dogs that can sniff out hidden cash. It is the largest offensive against the Galician fishing mafia ever. And it has been planned down to the most minor detail.

One team sets out for an office in the city of A Coruña, while two other teams drive towards Ribeira. When they have reached the Barbanza peninsula, some of the cars turn off the motorway, heading for the Vidal family’s fish oil factory near the city of Boiro. The rest of the cars continue driving another 20 kilometres along the gentle curves of the motorway leading to Ribeira. At exactly nine o’clock all the teams make their move.

By the time Miguel is inside the office in Ribeira with a search warrant in his hand, he is sure that he is expected. During the first few minutes the atmosphere is nervous; one of the staff is punching a number energetically into the telephone. The two computer specialists from Interpol receive the passwords for the computers and start mirroring the contents.

In drawers and cupboards Miguel and his colleagues find several dozen mobile phones and SIM cards. When he looks down into a box containing 30 SIM cards from Spain, Portugal and Thailand, Miguel understands why the telephone tap has not produced results. The shipping company’s people have been constantly switching telephones and communicating by Skype and Telegram, programs on which it is possible to delete messages a short time after they have been sent.3

Although the Guardia Civil will never find these messages, Miguel is satisfied with the find. The Guardia Civil wants to attempt to prove that the ship owner family Vidal and some dozen co-workers are an organized crime syndicate and it is only people with something to hide who replace the SIM card every time they communicate with one another, he thinks.

The Guardia Civil also makes another interesting find – a dozen passports belonging to little brother Angel “Naño” Vidal Pego. The passports are filled with stamps from Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam. It would seem that “Naño” has been responsible for the shipping company’s operations in Asia.4

After they have ransacked the offices in Ribeira, A Coruña and the fish oil factory in Boiro, the investigators travel to the homes of the two most important individuals in the shipping company – the father “Tucho” and the eldest son, “Toño”.

When they ransack the father’s villa in Ribeira, they let the dogs loose. In the large cellar facility under the villa they sniff at “Tucho’s” Bentley, the grey Land Rover he uses on a daily basis and his wife’s Mini Cooper, but they find nothing of significance.

After the action against the Vidal family the Guardia Civil procures another search warrant. And this time Miguel knows they will find concrete evidence.

When the Kunlun, Yongding and Songhua were on a mission in the Southern Ocean, every week they sent detailed reports to Vidal’s insurance broker in Vigo, the company ARTAI Corredores de Seguros. The reports confiscated by the Guardia Civil state how many kilos of toothfish the ships had fished in the course of seven days and how much the fish was worth. Every week the value of the cargo the rusty wrecks had in their cold storage rooms increased. It did not take long before the catch – the white gold – was worth far more than the ships. And these were valuable commodities the Vidal family wanted to insure.

They had flagged the ships in rogue states and hidden the holding companies in tax havens but the detailed insurance reports documenting the illegal fishing were sent to an office in Galicia.

Greed was the shipping company’s Achilles’ heel.

When Miguel adds up the totals from the many reports, he figures out that the Kunlun, Yongding and Songhua in the years from 2010 to 2015 have fished 5,800 tons of toothfish, for a documented value of EUR 81 million. Based on information from the Guardia Civil’s informants, it cost the shipping company around EUR 2 million a year to send the three ships to the Antarctic. The shipping company also had costs for port calls, warehousing and transport of the fish in Asia, but the profits were nonetheless astronomical.

Miguel cannot help thinking of everyone who has contributed to keeping the enterprise going for so long. Flag states, ship agents, port authorities, banks and insurance companies. Everyone must have known what they were taking part in, he thinks. The Kunlun, Yongding and Songhua had been blacklisted for years, but nonetheless, large European companies such as British Marine and German Allianz had sold insurance to Vidal’s pirate fleet.5 When the Guardia Civil turned up at the office of the insurance broker in Vigo, it was hardly necessary to mention the possibility of accomplice liability. ARTAI immediately cooperated with the police.6

Miguel is very satisfied with the evidence the Guardia Civil can present to the special national court of justice in Madrid. They have the insurance reports showing the amount of fish, the documents the Spanish fisheries authorities confiscated the previous year, an enormous amount of materials confiscated by the Australian authorities when they boarded the Kunlun and videos from New Zealand showing the Kunlun fishing in international waters. They know that the ship’s documents the captains have presented to the authorities in several countries are forgeries and they have crew lists with the names of Spanish citizens who have been on board the ships. After they received access to bank accounts in Spain, they also learned a lot about the Vidal family’s business model, not to mention, what has happened to all the money.

The shipping company has used the following method to launder the money back into Spain. When the fish was removed from the ocean, it was owned by the same company that owned the ship – companies registered in the tax havens of Panama and Belize. Then Vidal sold the fish to a company they personally controlled in Switzerland. The Swiss company then resold the fish to the buyers. Based on the confiscated materials, the Guardia Civil has identified ten companies in Hong Kong and Taiwan that bought toothfish from the Vidal family’s Swiss company. After the settlement was deposited into an account in Hong Kong, the money was forwarded to the Vidal family’s Spanish companies. There millions have been spent on financing investments in real estate, renewable energy and the fish oil factory in Boiro – the same factory with a large sign on the entrance gate proclaiming that the EU and the Spanish authorities have contributed EUR 6.6 million in subsidies. The white gold was used to build a business empire for the future.

By studying bank accounts and private consumption, the Guardia Civil investigators discover that large sums have also gone to the financing of private luxuries − big houses, expensive flats and extravagant cars. The rental of “Naño’s” Porsche 911 alone costs EUR 5,000 a month – far more than the salary of an experienced investigator for the Guardia Civil.

On the afternoon of 7 March, the neighbours in Ribeira watch in shock as members of the powerful Vidal clan are arrested and shipped off to remand prison in the capital of the province A Coruña and in Madrid. The patriarch “Tucho”, his two sons, daughter, son-in-law and the shipping company’s financial director are charged with environmental crime, money laundering, document forgery and being part of a crime syndicate. A few days later the six of them are released after having paid bail amounting to a total of EUR 600,000.

“Tucho” returns to the card table at his favourite bar the Doble SS.