The Chilean salmon company Australis Seafoods, owned by the Chinese giant Joyvio, has filed a complaint for the alleged crime of "unfair administration" against the former owner of the firm, the Chilean businessman Isidoro Quiroga, his sons Isidoro and Benjamín, his adviser Martín Guiloff and the former finance manager, Santiago Garretón.
It is the first criminal action in a legal battle that is expected to be long and eventful and that began at the end of last March when Joyvio –of the
holding
Legend, owner of the Lenovo technology company, initiated an international arbitration in which they demand the payment of 1,300 million to the previous controller for hiding information regarding environmental violations and breaches of production limits.
The Asian giant requests the return of the value paid by the company, 921 million dollars, plus 300 million dollars for damages.
The transnational accuses that, during the acquisition process in 2019, a series of environmental violations and non-compliance with maximum production limits were hidden from it.
In the document presented this Friday in the 4th Guarantee Court of Santiago, the Chilean capital, the current administration of the salmon company accuses having been deceived in the
due diligence process
[due diligence] on planting and harvest projections in the company's fattening centers.
"This production plan could only be achieved by infringing the respective RCA (Environmental Qualification Resolution) of each CES (Salmon Delivery Center) of the companies, a circumstance known to the defendants at the time of arranging to execute said production in time, in their capacity as administrators of the company”, indicates the court document.
Salmon workers Puerto Montt, Chile. DIEGO GIUDICE (BLOOMBERG NEWS)
The criminal action adds that the planting and harvesting plan presented by the previous owners at the time of the sale "was nothing more than a criminal plan that violated the law and environmental regulations, which resulted in a repeated overproduction" of salmon, which "which has compromised the assets of the companies, exposing them to severe sanctions for each of the infractions committed."
The complaint mentions, among others, a fine and the revocation of environmental permits.
To support their accusation, the lawyers for Australis, the Chileans Jorge Bofill and César Ramos, attach a series of emails between the former finance manager, Santiago Garretón, and the former general manager, Ricardo Misraji, who died in January of this year.
The texts would show that it was a concerted plan that would have been deliberately hidden from the new owners.
One of them shows a conversation between the two, after receiving a second fine from the Superintendence of the Environment in July 2021. "How bad really (...) our overproduction in the XII [region, in southern Chile ] They are very
heavy
... Nothing to do... They will start arriving one by one.
I hope they don't appear in the press," the complaint cites.
The company, through its general manager, Andrés Lyon, filed a self-report in November 2022 with the Superintendency of the Environment (SMA) for violating production authorizations in 33 salmon fattening centers – more than a third of the 96 concessions that the company has - in the extreme southern regions of Chile Aysén and Magallanes, between 2016 and 2022. These practices generated an overproduction of more than 80,000 tons of salmonids, according to the company itself.
Now, Australis risks fines of almost 70 million dollars, an amount that could be reduced thanks to self-reporting.