Some of the country's biggest fishing companies have been under-reporting their hoki catch by hundreds of tonnes, according to a leaked fisheries report.
The report has been kept secret from the public for seven years and environmentalists say it casts doubt on industry claims that lucrative hoki is being fished sustainably.
The companies include Sanford and Talley's.
Hoki is the most valuable export fish, earning the country $230 million last year and famously used in McDonald's filet-o-fish burgers.
The Ministry of Fisheries 2011 report said McDonald's supplier Talley's failed to report an estimated 780 tonnes of hoki in one season.
The report and Greenpeace's summary are here. Talleys is not the only company named, and it suggests pervasive underreporting in the hoki fishery. This is a serious crime with a penalty of five years imprisonment, and it calls the entire quota management system (which is predicated on honest reporting) into doubt. But instead of prosecuting these criminal companies, MPI suppressed the report, as usual. Our regulator is rotten to the core, to the extent that we should probably be considering it a co-conspirator in these cases...
What this report (and the others like it) show is that the public can not trust the fishing industry, and we can not trust MPI. We need to clean up both, and quickly, before they destroy our marine environment forever.