The Beginning & End. Saving a Global Fishing Company

This is the long and complicated story of saving a multinational global fishing company dogged by successes turned sour, massive debt, bankruptcies, greed, manipulation and clever accounting. Nueva Pescanova has been able to restructure its financing and fight off challenges to safeguard the future viability of the company and its business plan.

The only redeeming quality about bad dreams is their short longevity. But for Jose Fernandes Lopez, the Spaniard who created one of world’s most successful commercial fishing enterprises in Pescanova SA, it has been a grotesque, enduring, nightmare as the debt-riddled conglomerate has struggled for its very survival.

The former butcher who capitalised on meat freezing technology with the world’s first ocean-going freezer vessels more than a half century ago, and who created a huge fleet of trawlers and freezer vessels, aquaculture farms galore, offshore subsidiaries in Africa, Australia and South America and a global work force of 10000 in 26 countries, said in effect his has been pretty much a family business.

Perhaps so in years gone by, but now far beyond that.