We are contacting you regarding our ongoing investigation into aquaculture and the global fishmeal and fish oil industry, which has uncovered an array of industry-wide environmental and human rights concerns. These concerns date from between 2003 and the present, and they pertain to events or conditions on land or at sea.
Our investigation has found:
- Between 2003 and 2007, the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality negotiated cleanup orders and issued fines to Omega six different times for violations including leaking “ammonia, bacteria, nutrients, cyanide,” and other pollutants in…
I hope this email finds you well. I haven’t seen any further updates from your group on the Uyghur labor issue. While it took a lot of effort on our part to address your questions, I appreciate the fairness with which you treated our colleagues at Lund’s Fisheries.
I’m writing because another one of our clients received an email from Susan Ryan on your team addressed to their human resources email containing a 16-point list of accusations dating back to 2003. Ms. Ryan described the inquiry as related to an "ongoing investigation into aquaculture and the global fishmeal and fish oil industry,”…
Thanks, Bob. I appreciate the note. As you can imagine, we are dealing with quite a few companies as part of this investigation and not unlike last time we engaged with you, we prefer to stay in writing and on record. Susan will be happy to answer questions you have to the extent possible. If you see things in error, please, by all means, do include those in the reply you send back to her/us by email.
I appreciate your preference, and certainly everything can be on the record, but as we did with Lunds we will likely need to begin with a discussion to whittle down the list to something manageable from the current list that appears to be every story found in Google from the past 25 years.
Thanks for your emails. We will be conducting communications in writing. If there are errors in what we sent your client, feel free to identify and correct them. If there are questions you feel are not worth your answering, then you’re welcome to answer just the others.
We will not participate in a lengthy and time consuming written dialogue.
As for answering questions, as Ian can testify I always advise clients to respond to legitimate thoughtful questions, but what was sent to us were not thoughtful questions from a serious journalist who has completed their initial research. Instead it read like a the result of a Google search by a staff intern looking for every negative story written about our client in the past 25 years.
It seems you are asking my staff and my client to do your work for you.
When we last worked together with Lunds' Fisheries, we bega…
I emailed the corporate headquarters of Omega Protein on October 16 regarding our investigation into aquaculture and the global fishmeal and fish oil industry. We’ve since had correspondence from Bob Vanasse from the communications firm Stove Boat in relation to that email. We have explained that we need to keep this correspondence in writing, but he has declined, saying that “what was sent to us were not thoughtful questions from a serious journalist who has completed their initial research” and “instead it read like a the result of a Google search by a staff intern looking for every negative…
As previously mentioned, we are open to answering questions from The Outlaw Ocean Project, as we did when Ian had inquiries for Lund’s Fisheries.
I maintain my previous statement that your initial email did not contain "thoughtful questions from a serious journalist who has completed their initial research." What you sent were not questions at all. The email you sent contains no explicit questions. It's a series of statements/claims framed as our investigation has found. That's why I said, “it read like the result of a Google search by a staff intern looking for every negative story written…