A Northern California fisherman claims Pacific Seafood squeezes out competition and leaves crabbers with only one buyer — Pacific Seafood.
SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — A Portland, Oregon seafood processor, the country’s largest, faces an antitrust class action over what the lead plaintiff says is an egregious case of price fixing in the West Coast’s increasingly unstable Dungeness crab market.
Fisherman Brand Little of Auburn, California, filed a putative class action Monday accusing the $945 million company with fixing the price of the highly sought after Dungeness crab, which is found along the coasts and bays between Central California and Alaska.
Little says Pacific Seafood, which is owned by Frank Dulcich, the grandson of the company’s founder, has “for at least the last four years, and likely substantially longer” fixed the prices paid to the region’s crabbers. That has in turn dramatically reduced the amount of money earned by the crabbers and priced out customers during the peak demand period while forcing them to buy frozen crab from the previous year, also supplied by Pacific Seafood.
The class accuses Pacific Seafood, which has 2,500 employees and processing and distribution outlets in 11 states and British Columbia, of creating a monopsony by squeezing out competition and leaving crabbers with only one buyer — Pacific Seafood. Little says the processor uses coercion through “group boycotts, dumping, tying, and falsification of official ex vessel price records — as well as its own illegal unilateral conduct, rather than through the development of a superior product, business acumen, or historic accident.”
