The £53m eel smuggler
Salesman caught shipping rare species for Hong Kong black market
A SEAFOOD salesman has been convicted of smuggling more than £53million worth of critically endangered baby eels through the UK to Asia.
Gilbert Khoo, 67, shipped more than five million live juvenile eels, or elvers, from London to Hong Kong between 2015 and 2017 – labelling them as chilled fish.
He was caught in February 2017 after Border Force officers discovered 440lb of crated European eels at Heathrow in the first seizure of its kind in Britain.
This haul alone would have been worth at least £5.7million on the black market in Asia. The eels – which had been transported from Spain to Britain – were later returned safely to the wild.
When he was arrested on February 23, 2017, after arriving at Heathrow from Singapore, Khoo told National Crime Agency officers he was a middleman for buying and selling seafood.
But when his home was searched the NCA found paperwork confirming he had been smuggling the rare species under his company Icelandic Commodities Exports elvers from Ltd. EU He countries, would import holding the them at a farm in Gloucestershire before re- packaging them as ‘chilled fish’ to be sent onwards to East Asia – where they are worth ten times more than in the UK.
Demand is huge in the region, where the eels are considered a delicacy, and there are strict controls on their export due to their status as an endangered species. The NCA estimates that in two years Khoo successfully exported or attempted to export 1.75 tons of eels worth £53million on the Asian black market. Khoo, of Chessington in Surrey, was found guilty of three counts of failure to notify movement of animals and three counts of evasion of a prohibition or restriction on the export of goods at Southwark Crown Court yesterday.
NCA senior investigating officer Ian Truby said: ‘The entire operation run by Khoo to trade in these critically endangered animals was illegal from start to finish, and there is no doubt his sole motivation was money. We are determined to do all we can to stop the global black market trade of endangered species.’
The European eel population has plummeted by 90 per cent since the mid-1980s, leading to fishing restrictions and a ban on exports to Asia. Khoo will be sentenced on March 6.