BEYOND THE FLAG: Who Really Owns the World’s Large-Scale Fishing Fleet? MAY 2025
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15476309 © The Outlaw Ocean Project/Ed Ou
A new study by EqualSea Lab at the University of Santiago de Compostela, commissioned by Oceana, mapped the legal ownership of nearly 7,000 large-scale fishing (LSF) vessels.i It found that more than one in six vessels are legally owned in a country different from their flag state, and that nearly two-thirds of the global LSF fleet lack any available ownership information.
Ownership structures in the LSF fleet are often layered, opaque, and intentionally complex. Vessels may be built, registered, owned, operated, and land their catch across multiple jurisdictions. Legal and beneficial owners may be several steps removed from the flag state and based in entirely different countries. So, while the flag shows where a vessel is legally registered at a given time, it reveals nothing about who owns it, who profits from its activities, or where those owners are based.
Without knowing who owns and controls a fishing vessel, authorities struggle to enforce laws effectively or hold operators accountable. Hidden ownership enables bad actors to exploit weak governance, evade sanctions, dodge taxes, and undermine sustainability and fair competition.
This complexity is rarely accidental. It reflects deliberate strategies to lower costs, dodge taxes, or secure additional fishing opportunities. It also allows owners to potentially bypass regulations, evade sanctions, and conceal activities behind corporate veils. The result is a fragmented system of responsibility that weakens flag state control, reduces revenue for coastal states, and exacerbates threats to sustainability and equity.
While responsibility for a vessel’s technical, administrative, and social matters lies with the country whose flag it flies,1 in today’s globalized fishing sector, a flag only tells part of the story. True accountability requires the identification of beneficial owners: the individual people who ultimately benefit from a vessel’s activities, even if their names do not appear in official records. This is critical for closing legal loopholes and ensuring that the people profiting from fishing are subject to proper scrutiny. Yet under current transparency standards, identifying them is often impossible. As a first step toward greater accountability, this study identifies the top-tier companies that own LSF vessels — the legal owners — and the countries where they are incorporated.
This opacity is particularly concerning because industrial fishing vessels account for 60% of all marine fisheries landings2 and receive over 80% of all government fisheries subsidies.3 Their outsized role in seafood production makes ownership transparency in the LSF fleet critical to fisheries governance. To ensure proper oversight, we must move beyond the flag and demand full transparency about who truly owns, controls, and profits from large-scale fishing vessels.
i Due to data availability, LSF vessels are identified by the presence of an International Maritime Organisation (IMO) number. The IMO Ship Identification Number Scheme applies to ships of >100 GT, including fishing vessels of steel and non-steel hull construction and to all motorized inboard fishing vessels <100 GT down to a size limit of 12 meters in length overall (LOA) authorized to operate outside waters under the national jurisdiction of the flag state.
1