Scottish Salmon Company boasts of harmlessness
A triumphal blast of publicity from the Scottish Salmon Company, which owns the Lamlash fish farm, boasted of its expansion plans and in the same breath declared itself to have no adverse effect on the environment. Many Arran residents were staggered. As one person enquired, ‘Short term memory loss?’
The photos in the Arran Voice when it was a newsprint production told a different story, showing bins full of maggot-ridden dead salmon. The St Molios fish farm in Lamlash Bay has a long history of over-stocking and disease, and though it has worked hard to improve things, the unending struggle against sea lice goes on. The long-term damage to the seabed is clearly visible. Divers from COAST saw for themselves the build-up of faeces, surplus food and chemicals, spreading its footprint far beyond the pen. See http://www.int-res.com/articles/feature/m326p001.pdf detailed scientific paper on effects of fish farms on the sea bed.
The company’s chosen name can be queried, as well. A glance at the directors’ annual report for 2013 shows something very different from shortbread-tin Scottishness. Far the largest shareholder is SIX SIS AG (formerly SWX Swiss Exchange), based in Zurich. Its board of directors at is headed by Robert Brown III, who owns 350,000 shares in the company. He is a general partner of the Kazakhstan Investment Fund and Chairman of Quorum Fund, a private fund investing in listed Russian shares.
The other directors are equally non-Scottish. Martins Jaunarajs is a Senior Investment Director of BaltCap, a private equity and venture capital group in Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. Viacheslav Lavrentyev is Head of Corporate Finance Advisory with FMC Advisors Ltd, Russia. Ms Merete Myhrstad, with a mere 40,000 shares, has extensive experience from the Norwegian stock market. Philip Smith appears to be a tax consultant – though there are a lot of Philip Smiths about and this is difficult to verify. The St Molios fish farm, in fact, belongs to a group of directors whose main interests are in the happy hunting grounds of Eastern Europe.
Fishwise, it has not been a happy year for the ‘Scottish’ Salmon Company. Hampered by diseases — mainly amoebic gill disease— and bad weather, its harvest fell from 23,945 tonnes in 2012 to 20,825 last year. Of this total, 1,479 tonnes consisted of small fish weighing less than 1 kilo – no more than babies, by salmon standard. These immature fish were therefore harvested at cost.
The company, controlled by its Ukrainian-born investor, decided to issue no dividends for the year. Its directors, however, did not suffer. The outgoing CEO, Stewart McLelland, who quit his job at the end of last year. was paid a salary of £221,000 during the year, and £29,000 in additional payments. CFO Robert Wilson took home £202,000. Craig Anderson, who replaced McLelland as CEO on Jan. 1, 2014, is on a £43,000 salary but through other benefits took home £87,000. By big banking standards these figures may be peanuts, but it’s not bad pay from a company that could declare no dividend.
