The name alone – “Fishrot” – conjures up the unpleasant stench of corruption.
The financial scandal – named after a 2019 Wikileaks release called the “Fishrot Files” – stretches from Namibia to Iceland, taking in government ministers and involving at least $20m (£16.6m).
The southern African country is now preparing for the biggest corruption trial in its short history.
It is all about fish quotas – not an immediately obvious source of corruption, but in Namibia they are very lucrative.
With nearly 1,600km (1,000 miles) of South Atlantic coastline, fishing is one of the country’s main industries, accounting for about 20% of export earnings.
In the Fishrot scandal, a number of prominent politicians and businessmen are accused of running schemes to get control of valuable fishing quotas, for example those held by the state fishing company Fishcor. It is alleged that they then diverted them to the Icelandic fishing company Samherji in return for kickbacks.
Ten suspects, including former Fisheries Minister Bernard Esau and ex-Justice Minister Sakeus Shangala, are alleged to have benefitted.
All those accused, some of whom have been in detention for over three years now, have protested their innocence. Samherji, one of Iceland’s most important companies, has strongly denied allegations of bribery.
The scandal has also damaged the wider Namibian fishing industry. Jobs have gone and government revenue has been lost – that money should have been used to assist the poorest in one of the most unequal societies in the world.
Firstly, some of the money earned by Fishcor was supposed to have gone to social programmes such as drought and unemployment relief. Secondly, as the fishing quotas were diverted, Namibian fishing suffered as a whole.
The scandal first broke in November 2019, when WikiLeaks shared over 30,000 documents – including company e-mails, contracts, presentations and photos – leaked by a former Samherji manager in Namibia, Johannes Stefansson. He alleged that the company had colluded with a group of influential figures to get access to the fishing quotas at below the market price.
This has proved to be a complex case and the slow legal process is expected to end up in a court soon, but it is also having a real-world impact.
Creating jobs and prosperity for Namibians was the dream when the country became independent 33 years ago and finally laid claim to its wealth of marine resources, which had been exploited for decades by other nations.
The new government under the liberation movement-turned political party Swapo (South West Africa People’s Organisation) adopted a policy of “Namibianisation”, giving fishing rights to the country’s citizens and forcing outsiders into joint ventures if they wanted access to its resources.
But a policy that was good in principle has run into problems, according to Graham Hopwood, executive director of the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) in Namibia.
“The rights to various different types of fish in our sea are given on extended periods of 10, 15 years and so on to companies that are Namibian, or majority-Namibian owned,” he says.
“That, in theory is good, but these are mostly briefcase companies that only exist on paper, often owned by people who have no knowledge of fishing and no infrastructure, but see this as a means of making money; and a lot of these people are also politically connected.”
The IPPR is not alone in its assessment that the opaque way in which the industry is run and regulated has made it vulnerable to abuse.
Samherji has consistently denied allegations of bribery. When the scandal broke, it commissioned a Norwegian law firm to conduct an investigation. Following its report the company issued a statement, which acknowledged the issue while maintaining there was no bribery involved.
“It was necessary to pay more attention to how payments were made, who they were made to and on what basis, who had the authority to give instructions about them and where they should be received,” Samherji said. “It is also clear that the underlying agreements behind the payments should have been precise and formal.”
The company also said it had taken extensive steps to avoid mistakes being made in the future.
It blames any criminal activity that may have occurred on the whistle blower, Johannes Stefansson.
But Mr Stefansson says others authorised payments and he is set to be the prosecution’s most important witness at the trial later this year.