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Police and fisheries officers today began dawn raids on houses and business premises in a massive poaching bust centred on a Wellington-based man trading as much as a tonne of illicit paua each week.
"He would typically pay his divers $17/kg for the paua meat and on-sell it for about $50/kg," said Fisheries Ministry national investigations manager Shaun Driscoll.
This was generating $13,000 a week for the man - who was arrested today - and $7000 for his divers, and showed paua poaching was being seen as a "lucrative criminal enterprise".
The big bust - dubbed Operation Paid - has implicated not only Mongrel Mob gangsters and Asian restaurateurs, but some of the people who escaped the ministry's 2002 Operation Pacman after the Appeal Court found a 2001 law change had made it legal to receive money for poached seafood.
The work of two undercover officers in that operation crashed and burned when more than 20 men who had pleaded guilty to poaching and served jail terms had their convictions quashed. One couple were even reimbursed thousands of dollars for their 184kg of seized paua.
But Mr Driscoll said today the law-draughting problems which gutted Operation Pacman had been fixed and there would be no such loophole for the 64 suspects now being targeted.
A number of those arrested today were recidivist offenders , he said.
Another eight offenders have already appeared before the courts through associated enforcement actions.
Today's arrests - involving 133 fisheries officers and about 70 police in 76 addresses at Auckland, Wellington, Opotiki and Hastings - are part of the largest operation mounted since 2002 and follow a 12 month covert operation.
About 35 vehicles are also being seized, in the course of laying an expected 291 criminal charges. An undercover officer bought over 9.3 tonnes of paua - 36,000 shellfish - and sold them on to buyers acting as wholesalers. The paua was worth about $870,000 wholesale and had a retail value of $1.3 million, but Mr Driscoll said it represented only part of the buyers' illegal operations.
"These buyers are then either distributing the illegal paua into the domestic market or on-selling it to high-level dealers who are involved in both domestic and export distribution," he said. These high-level dealers were the ultimate target for fisheries enforcement.
Many of the suspects, including 20 members of gangs such as the Mongrel Mob, were from around Upper Hutt and Lower Hutt, but respected businessmen such as restaurateurs in Auckland and Wellington were also being arrested.
Mr Driscoll said the crimes were highly organised and involved Asian operators, but there was no evidence of Asian gangs such as triads taking part, and there was no evidence of drugs being exchanged for shellfish.
Operation Paid began in September 2007 in the wake of signs that demand was again increasing the theft of paua from the Wellington coast, even though previous operations had shut down a range of distribution and illegal export channels.
Mr Driscoll said paua thefts were a "direct attack" on the rights of law-abiding New Zealanders: "It is a criminal enterprise motivated entirely by greed, targeting paua stocks which are easily accessible".
"If it is allowed to continue on the scale identified in this and previous operations, it will destroy the local fishery," he said.
Paua theft in the region was organised and the distribution chain was complex. "People involved in paua poaching rings like this are seasoned criminals, often members or associates of gangs, who are often involved in other criminal activity," he said. In Operation Paid, many of the actual divers came from ethnic gangs, mostly Mongrel Mob members and their associates.
- NZPA
