Today sees the launch of a new transparency website from the FollowTheMoney.eu stable. It presents data on 97,260 payments totalling 8.5 billion euro from 1994 to 2006. Of this 3.4 billion euro was paid to vessels and 5.1 billion euro to non-vessel recipients. Most of this money was paid from the EU budget with some ‘co-financing’ from national governments. 44 per cent of the money went to Spain.

The EU’s common fisheries policy (CFP) is a system of rules, fishing quotas, enforcement controls and subsidies that has failed to stop the decline of fish stocks. Up until 2004 a large share of the money was spent on building powerful new fishing vessels and subsidies continue to be paid for modernisation of vessels and other measures that increase the pressure on dwindling fish stocks.

The data was provided by the European Commission and since the first disclosure in 2007, we have received a further three versions of the data, each time a little bit cleaner and with fewer mistakes. It has been a long process to obtain and verify the data and there are still errors and anomalies (for example misspellings, errors in location and date information and some completely blank fields). The data also fails to identify the owners of the vessels receiving subsidy or the companies and organisations who receive non-vessel fisheries subsidies. It is by no means a perfect data set but we think now is the right time to publish it on fishsubsidy.org.

The common fisheries policy is currently undergoing a policy review and we hope that greater transparency will ensure that the debate about the future of the policy is informed by accurate, detailed and relevant information. We see the launch of the fishsubsidy.org website as just the start in a process of greater public scrutiny of subsidies paid under the CFP.

A year ago Greenpeace confronted the Albatun Dos, a Spanish vessel said to be the ‘world’s biggest tuna destroyer’, while it was fishing in the Pacific Ocean. They made a video of the encounter, which shows the Albatun Dos at work.

If you look up the Alabatun Dos on fishsubsidy.org, you’ll find the construction of this 116 metre long ship was financed by a 4.9 million euro taxpayer subsidy. But the Alabatun Dos isn’t the biggest recipient. That particular distinction goes to the Helen Mary, a German-registered vessel, whose owners received 6.4 million euro in handouts from the common fisheries policy. Take a look at the rest of the top recipient vessels.

We intend to update the database with new data for subsequent years but it is a major cause for concern that from 2007 onwards, the data on fisheries subsidies is to be made available in a highly fragmented way – each member state having responsibility for the disclosure of its own data. This is an unwelcome departure from the previous arrangements where the Commission played a co-ordinating role and compiled data from all member states to release to us. The fragmented future system of discloser will make it much more difficult to locate, extract and compile the data and as a consequence, much harder to achieve a genuinely pan-EU overview of what is going on.

Massive thanks to Simon Roe who built the fishsubsidy.org website and Richard Pope who made it look nice. Markus Knigge of the European Marine Programme of the Pew Environment Group was the first to obtain the data from the Commission and Nils Mulvad did the cleaning, structuring and analysis of the data.

Visit fishsubsidy.org

Read a short dossier of key findings