A fisherman with a history of rule-bending has received a hefty fine, copping criticism from a judge for being “cavalier”.
Campbell David McManaway has been fined a total of $34,000 on two charges under fisheries regulations that breached compulsory reporting around his position at sea.
Judge Tony Snell said in reeling off a list of McManaway’s previous offending that he found it hard to accept the defence’s position that it was a mistake and not pre-meditated.
He accepted that there was nothing to show the fisheries resource had been harmed in this instance, but the public of New Zealand was the primary victim, and punishment had to mean more than simply a business cost.
The breaches occurred in January 2024 during two commercial fishing trips, where crews were diving for kina off Moeraki, North Otago.
McManaway was charged with failing to check whether the onboard Geospatial Positioning Reporting (GPR) device on the lead vessel being used was working.
The digital monitoring project helps support sustainable fisheries by tracking, reporting, and monitoring commercial fishing. Vessels involved in commercial fishing are required to operate such devices.
The charges followed a warning by a fishery officer to McManaway a month earlier.
On December 20, 2023, the Ministry of Primary Industries received GPR transmissions from two support boats registered to a vessel named the San Nicholas but nothing was being transmitted from that vessel itself.
Inquiries by fishery officers found McManaway had borrowed the two boats for the fishing trip to support his vessel Cando which he was operating at the time.
He was told he needed to fix it before fishing again.
It wasn’t until after the two fishing trips from Moeraki in January 2024 that Cando’s GPR device was found not to have been operating on either trip, but the data from its two support vessels was transmitting.
The support vessels were linked to the permit holder, Galeforce Fishing, the owner of the San Nicholas.
When contacted by a fishery officer, McManaway said he would “need to find” Cando’s GPR device. He claimed to have found it later, but it was flat and needed charging.
McManaway’s lawyer Marty Logan said there was nothing to indicate anything happened other than lawful fishing, apart from the fact the vessel was not “polling”, but Judge Snell couldn’t be sure.
“While we know what the two tenders were up to we don’t know what the Cando was up to and can never know where it was or where it went, which is the whole point of the legislation.”
Nelson-based McManaway held a significant portion of the kina quota where the offending occurred. Logan submitted that he therefore had a vested interest in ensuring its sustainability, and it was little other than an “offence of slackness”.
Judge Snell suggested that was a double-edged sword in that McManaway had caught almost his entire annual quota in a matter of days, without the system working properly, when in theory he had a year to fix it.
“I don’t see this as slackness. He was told but persisted in going fishing. The obligation was to comply but he didn’t.
“This was a blatant exercise in going to sea without having fixed the problem,” Judge Snell said.
He added that it was rare for someone to be warned, and still head out fishing.
Logan also submitted that the Cando was using GPS (an electronic navigation tool) and that MPI had looked at its track, which meant the boat was “not invisible”.
However, MPI prosecutor Alan De Jager said the two systems (GPS and GPR) worked differently in that GPS did not “transmit” in real-time and extracting it from the vessel would have required someone going onboard to download it.
In setting the penalty, the maximum of which was a $100,000 fine, Judge Snell omitted McManaway’s earliest offending in the fines equation but included an uplift for McManaway’s most recent offending.
In November 2022, McManaway and his company Cando were fined $52,000 and banned from pāua fishing for three years on multiple fisheries charges, after a fishing trip in southern Fiordland in early February 2020.
Judge Snell also noted McManaway’s history of criminal convictions for dishonesty.
“I agree with the prosecution – the offending was deliberate and pre-meditated. This has to be regarded as a serious breach that strikes at the heart of the scheme,” he said.
From a starting point of $50,000, Judge Snell arrived at fines of $34,000 which was $17,000 on each charge.
The penalty included forfeiture of Cando, with relief set at $2000 – the amount McManaway has to pay to get it back.
Judge Snell said that amounted to 1% of the boat’s estimated value, which was a lower figure than most other forfeiture amounts, but reflected that the offending did not deplete any fisheries resource.
