you paid top dollar for at Whole Foods because you thought it had spent its youth frolicking in a Scottish fish farm might just be some fraud flown in from Chile.The former head buyer for one of the nation’s biggest providers of Scottish smoked salmon claims in a federal lawsuit that her bosses pressured her to dupe major retailers into thinking they were buying prized Scottish salmon when they were instead getting a cheap Chilean catch.
Denise Chadwick of Clifton says she was fired by St. James Smokehouse on March 12, one day after she sent her boss an email warning of the potential for criminal charges if the feds got wind of what the company was up to, according to a whistleblower lawsuit she filed in U.S. District Court in Newark on Tuesday.
Chadwick, 60, said she’d become increasingly concerned that the Miami-based company could be violating U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations by labeling fish from Norway and Chile as “Product of Scotland,” the lawsuit says.
“I pointed out to you at the time that this is in direct violation of FDA rules and it is an imprisonable offense,” Chadwick wrote in an email to the company’s owner Brendan Maher. “I also said you would be the one going to prison as you owned the company.”
Brendan Maher, the owner of St. James, could not be reached for comment.
Chadwick’s lawyer, Aaron Freiwald, said Chadwick’s job was to gauge the price of salmon in the international market and to purchase bulk quantities for sale in the United States.
While the per-pound price varies, Scottish salmon typically sells for double the price of Chilean salmon, Freiwald said.
Often, buyers were unaware that they were getting what’s considered an inferior salmon, the lawsuit says.
“As chief buyer, Ms. Chadwick came under increasing pressure to buy cheaper Chilean salmon, often thousands of pounds at a time,” the lawsuit says. “Ms. Chadwick learned that the cheaper salmon was being sent to smoke houses in Miami and Scotland and then packaged and sold as more expensive Scottish salmon.”
Chadwick is a native of England who has worked in Scotland. She was hired by St. James as its principal buyer in August 2012, the lawsuit says.
She’s lived in New Jersey for the past 14 years and has spent the bulk of her career working in the fish industry, Freiwald said.
Chadwick made similar allegations against a Clifton-based salmon supplier in a 2012 lawsuit filed in state Superior Court in Passaic County. In that case, Chadwick alleged that she was slapped in the face by her boss after she questioned the business practices of managers at North Landing Ltd.
Among Chadwick’s claims then were that North Landing passed off Chilean salmon as Scottish, according to a report by Courthouse News Service.
Freiwald said the case against North Landing was settled for undisclosed terms. A man who answered the phone at North Landing today declined to comment. “It’s settled,” he said without giving his name
In interviews, Maher has touted St. James as one of the few authentic providers of salmon plucked from the waters of western Scotland to U.S. retailers and restaurants.
He told one interviewer in 2012 that the company’s emergence in the American market owed to the fact that St. James was one of the few companies not trying to trick retailers into buying Chilean salmon.
“There’s a huge demand for smoked salmon there and a perception that anything Scottish is superior but what you had was U.S. domestic smokers buying it from Chile, smoking it and sticking it in a bag with a bit of tartan on it,” he was quoted as saying in an article posted on the company’s website.
Chadwick claims in the lawsuit that invoices to Whole Foods, Wegman’s and other retailers were purposefully mislabeled to suggest they were from Scotland. She said Maher told her to sell an unidentified Chicago customer salmon from Norway even though the customer only wanted farm-raised salmon from Scotland, the lawsuit claims.
And, the lawsuit alleges that one of the few times in the last year when she purchased Scottish salmon was when regulators planned to visit a St. James factory in the village of Annan in Scotland.
“I think the last time I ordered a full truck from Scotland for smoking in Annan was in August last year and since then I have been buying Norwegian except for when I was instructed to buy Scottish when we had visitors – for example when the FDA came to inspect the factory in Scotland and I had to make sure there was only Scottish salmon on the premises,” she wrote in the March email to Maher.
Chadwick is suing the company as a whistleblower under the state’s Conscientious Employee Protection Act because, she claims, her bosses retaliated against her when she questioned practices that could be in violation of federal seafood safety and marketing rules.
