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Mississippi seafood dealers and company executives plead guilty to falsely labeling imported seafood as local

WASHINGTON – The Justice Department said Tuesday that a Mississippi fishmonger and two company executives pleaded guilty to conspiring with others to mislabel seafood and commit wire fraud by marketing cheap and frozen imported substitutes as more expensive and higher-quality domestic species.

The largest seafood wholesaler on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Quality Poultry and Seafood Inc., agreed to pay a $1 million penalty and a $150,000 fine to the U.S. Two men – QPS sales manager Todd A. Rosetti and general manager James W. Gunkel – pleaded guilty to mislabeling fish, facilitating the fraud.

QPS admitted to participating in the fish substitution program as early as 2002 and through November 2019, the Justice Department said. QPS recommended and sold its restaurant customers fish from foreign sources that could serve as convincing substitutes for the domestic species that the restaurants touted on the menu. In addition, QPS also labeled cheap imports that it sold to customers in its retail store and cafe as premium domestic fish, the Justice Department said.

Representatives of the company and QPS have conspired for more than a decade to commit fraud that could harm fishermen and wholesalers in the market, the Justice Department said.

“Mislabeling of seafood harms local wholesalers and fishermen who compete to sell premium, locally produced fish in a market unfairly flooded with cheaper fish that has been frozen or imported from overseas,” said Todd Kim, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division.

Earlier this year, Louisiana passed a series of laws designed to increase transparency and protect Louisiana’s historic culinary heritage.

A law specifically prohibits the misleading description of seafood as “Louisiana style” or “New Orleans style” unless all processing takes place locally or in the Gulf region.

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