The godfather of the shrimp business has to pay a €13m fine after selling expensive shrimp for years

North sea gray shrimp, a delicacy with the money. Especially if you come to an agreement with your main competitors to divide the Dutch, Belgian, French and German markets and coordinate prices. Dutch shrimp merchants Heiploeg, Klaas Puul and Kok Seafood along with German Stührk have maintained this profitable business model for nine years. All those years their customers – especially department stores – worked and in the end consumers paid a lot of money for the “gray gold from the North Sea”.

Denounce the cartel

Until one of the four, Claes Paul, reports the cartel to the European competition watchdog in order to escape a fine that threatens millions. At the end of November 2013, the investigation was completed and three of the four companies were fined 28.7 million euros. The bulk of this, more than 27 million, is credited to Heiploeg, who has been exposed as the main focus of the cartel.

A huge fine hits the company, which is now in financially troubled waters, midshipman: the company can’t make the payment and sinks. At the time, Heiploeg, which started as a herring business in 1949, employed around 3,000 people in the Netherlands, Belgium (in the Ostend Morubel branch), Morocco, Suriname, Denmark and India.

“evil genius”

The company quickly restarts in diluted form, and the estate is left bankrupt with a debt of more than 100 million euros. Hendrik Nienhuis, under whose leadership the company grew to become the European market leader in the North Sea shrimp trade, was not far from the picture at that point: he resigned as CEO in 2004. However, he is being taken to court by the trustees: according to To them, Nienhuis is an “evil genius and driving force” responsible for illegal price-fixing, which began in 2000, when he became CEO.

Not that this made a huge impression on Groninger: “I’ve already gone through the last five years that cartel deals have been made. They can do something for me, ”says it at the end of 2015. North newspaper. “They can want anything. They get nothing from me.” When he was finally awarded more than €13m in damages at the end of 2020, no one was surprised that he appealed immediately. But also on appeal, the “godfather of the shrimp business” was now ordered to pay half of the cartel’s fine, because he had been at the helm of Heiploeg for half the term. According to his lawyer, Ninhuis can appeal the verdict in the cassation case.