“Big Five”: A groundbreaking investigation into five Dutch supermajors, predators of the world’s oceans

20 May 2025

BLOOM, in collaboration with the “Spit” consortium of Dutch journalists, publishes a groundbreaking investigation into the activities and expansion strategies of five Dutch supermajors who dominate industrial fishing in Europe and have extended their hold over the world’s oceans. These five companies, nicknamed the “Big Five” — Parlevliet & Van der Plas, Cornelis Vrolijk, Van der Zwan, Alda Seafood and the De Boer family — control the entire production chain, from catch to plate, on a global scale. The study reconstructs the sprawling expanse of their subsidiaries, comprising 400 companies and 230 vessels, as well as their complex commercial interconnections, to shed light on their hegemony.

Today, the Big Five’s dominance constitutes a real oligopoly capable of influencing public decisions to its advantage. The Big Five’s control over the European fishing industry is the result of permissive institutional mechanisms, political complicity, and intentionally opaque financial operations and structures. Some of the Big Five are now investing in real estate, revealing a harmful extractivist approach to wild resources, the opposite of the sustainable management advocated for by the European Union. The Big five’s approach maximizes short-term profits by turning fish into earnings to be invested elsewhere. In this way, the Big Five embody the most harmful form of financialized capitalism, one that drives public decision-making to privatize profits while socializing losses at the public’s expense (destruction of marine ecosystems, jobs, coastal territories and public finances).

>>>Read the “The Big Five : The grip of five Dutch corporate giants on the global ocean”<<<

An opaque, interconnected network with global influence

Over the decades, the Big Five have built up a highly complex operational and financial network. They form a powerful network, sharing quotas, co-owning vessels, defending their common interests through joint lobbying and investing together in subsidiaries to increase their control over resources. Through international subsidiaries, the Big Five are members of at least fifteen lobbying organizations active in the European Union.¹ Their powerful lobbying thus influences political decisions at the level of member states and European institutions.

“Thanks to a network of opaque subsidiaries, a fleet of technologically over-equipped vessels, and an aggressive takeover strategy, these multinationals reign over global fishing. Behind a façade of competition, these companies cooperate closely: they join forces to crush the other players in the sector“, explains Laetitia Bisiaux, head of the industrial fishing campaign at BLOOM. This extreme concentration in the hands of a few players translates into an opaque stranglehold on fishery resources, to the detriment of marine ecosystems, artisanal fishermen and the common good.

Updated on: 20/05/2025

The groups structures were mapped based on their 2023 annual reports and completed with data from Company.info, Orbis, North Data and Companies House, among others (see dataset for details). As a result, company ownership may be outdated.
The vessels owners were identified through the Global Integrated Shipping Information System (GISIS) of the International Maritime Organization (IMO).

Download dataset

 

A giant fleet with destructive techniques

Their industrial logic is based on gigantic vessels and massive extraction capacity, which is incompatible with the preservation of healthy marine ecosystems. Together, the Big Five own around 230 fishing vessels, several of which are among the largest in the world. The most emblematic, the Annelies Ilena, is 145-meter long and catches 400 tons of fish a day (as much as 1,000 small-scale fishing boats do in a day). If you lined up all their ships in a row, they would stretch for almost 10 kilometres. All Big Five vessels (except one) use destructive fishing techniques: bottom trawling, pelagic trawling, demersal seining, fish aggregating devices (FADs) for tropical tuna. Their ecological footprint is global: their destructive gear is deployed from the coasts of Africa to the Arctic, via Suriname and Chile.

Fishing vessels, storage sheds, processing plants, distribution chains and even crew recruitment agencies – the Big Five control every stage of the fishing industry. This enables them to buy fish from their own subsidiaries at artificially low prices to reduce the wages paid to crews, who are often paid by the share, and to transfer profits to tax havens.

Trajectories of ships operated by the Big Five between January 1, 2020 and January 1, 2025 (source: Global Fishing Watch)

French fishing under Dutch control

After the Netherlands, it’s in France that the Big Five have invested the most capital. 24 industrial vessels concentrating a large proportion of French quotas operate under the French flag via their subsidiaries: CFTO (Compagnie française du thon océanique) acquired by P&P in 2016 (10 vessels); Euronor and Compagnie des Pêches Saint-Malo, both acquired by P&P in 2011 (7 vessels combined); and France Pélagique (7 vessels), co-founded in 1988 by Cornelis Vrolijk. By sitting on bodies such as the Comité National des Pêches, the heads of the French subsidiaries give the Big Five a means of directly influencing the rules, in their own interests.

Fishing giants, frauds and corruption

Every company in the Big Five has been implicated in legal cases around the world. In Namibia, Peru, Norway and Cameroon, these companies and their executives have been accused or convicted of various offences, including illegal fishing, corruption related to obtaining fishing rights, tax evasion, “high-grading” (dumping the catch to replace it with fatter or more valuable species, causing high unreported fish mortality), unreported catches and marine pollution. Between 2012 and 2019, Icelandic company Samherji, which founded Alda Seafood in the Netherlands in 2019, was at the heart of the Fishrot corruption scandal in Namibia involving the payment of bribes to Namibian officials to obtain fishing quotas. One of the vessels that received corrupt quotas in Namibia, the Saga, was operated by Atlantex, then wholly owned by Samherji. The Saga also held European quotas (Polish in this case). In 2018, P&P acquired 50% of Atlantex at a knock-down price, and a few months later, P&P sold the Annelies Ilena (the world’s largest factory ship, 145 m) to Atlantex to recover Polish quotas from the Saga, which in the meantime had fled to South America to launder its flag. These opaque and fraudulent operations demonstrate the predatory nature of these industrial giants.

Diversification into real estate reveals harmful extractive capitalism

Faced with the prospect of a depletion of fish populations, many of these fishing giants are beginning to redirect their investments towards real estate. This change is a sign that the extractive model has run its course. For example, the Van der Plas family recently sold its shares to the Parlevliet family, to concentrate on real estate. This development reflects the “scorched earth” economic logic analyzed by economist Colin Clark as early as the 1970s: as long as it is more profitable to overexploit a resource than to manage it sustainably, economic players give priority to the short term, even if this means compromising the ecological, social and economic future of their activities. When fish becomes nothing more than a transitory profit lever, it’s not only marine ecosystems that are at risk, but also the stability of coastal territories, food sovereignty and ultimately, the viability of our planet.

Regaining control over the Big Five

None of this is inevitable. This system is the direct result of public policies that have allowed and encouraged the uncontrolled expansion of these companies. It is also the product of a system locked in opacity, where the economic interests of industrial players take precedence over the common good. Against this backdrop, we urgently need to fundamentally rethink the economic and political model that currently governs access to marine resources. We must regain control of our fishing policies, protect artisanal fishermen and the ocean from industrial appropriation, and move away from an extractivist economic model to build genuine social and ecological justice. If we do nothing, it’s not just biodiversity that will disappear, but also a certain vision of democracy and the common good, sacrificed on the altar of unbridled capitalist greed. There is still time to act, but the window is narrowing. Action requires political courage and independence from the harmful influence of industrial lobbies.