Report | May, 2025
Beyond the Flag
NEW OCEANA-COMMISSIONED RESEARCH CALLS ATTENTION TO LACK OF OWNERSHIP TRANSPARENCY AND CONCENTRATION OF CONTROL IN THE WORLD’S LARGE-SCALE FISHING (LSF) FLEET.
Industrial fishing vessels account for 60% of all marine fisheries landings and receive over 80% of all global government fisheries subsidies. Their outsized role in seafood production makes ownership transparency in the world’s large-scale fishing (LSF) fleet critical to fisheries governance.
This study, prepared by EqualSea Lab at the University of Santiago de Compostela and commissioned by Oceana, provides the most comprehensive mapping of ownership to date of the world’s LSF fleet, covering nearly 7,000 vessels across 143 flag states. Notably, the report found that nearly two-thirds of LSF vessels lack any available ownership information.
As a first step toward greater accountability the researchers identified the top-tier companies that own LSF vessels – the legal owners – and the countries where they are registered. With the data available, they found that more than one in six vessels are legally owned in a country different from their flag state and that just 10 countries account for legal ownership of more than half of the vessels with available data.
While a vessel’s flag shows where it is legally registered at a given time, it does not reveal who owns, is accountable for, and truly profits from its activities, nor where those owners are located. 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. Without this information, authorities struggle to effectively enforce laws or hold operators accountable, enabling bad actors to exploit weak governance, evade sanctions, dodge taxes, and undermine sustainability and fair competition.
In light of this major ownership gap, Oceana is calling for all flag states to collect and verify legal and beneficial ownership information for all fishing vessels at the time of registration and flagging, and to make this data publicly available, as recommended in the Global Charter for Fisheries Transparency. We must move beyond the flag and demand full transparency about who really owns, controls, and profits from large-scale fishing vessels.
For further information on making distant-water fishing more transparent and accountable, please visit Oceana’s Transparent Oceans Initiative.
Press contacts: Gillian Spolarich (gspolarich@oceana.org), Lindsey Godbout (lgodbout@oceana.org)
