The fishing industry in New Zealand has scooped the pool in the annual Roger Awards for bad behaviour by transnational companies.
While M?ori use of foreign charters captured the headlines in the ministerial investigation into the industry, it was non-M?ori companies that featured in the Rogers.
Murray Horton from the Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa says the winner, Taejin Fisheries, is a South Korean company about whom information is non-existent.
It employed Indonesian crew on its two trawlers, Melilla 201 and Melilla 203 in conditions that a report on the New Zealand fishing industry suggested was brutal and inhumane.
Accomplice awards went to privately-owned Christchurch Company United Fisheries, which chartered boats from Taejin, and the government, which continued to issue work permits for new crew to be employed offshore despite press reports of ill-treatment.
Mr Horton says United Fisheries’ role in the appalling treatment of foreign fishing crews damages New Zealand’s international reputation in the fishing industry, and undermines the clean and green image New Zealand likes to project in foreign markets.
Runners up were New Zealand King Salmon, which has just received permission to build more fish farms in the Marlborough Sounds over the objections of iwi and environmentalists, and Bluff Smelter owner Rio Tinto.
2013, Uma Broadcasting Ltd