A second member of the government’s Scallop Management Board has been prosecuted for illegal fishing, it has emerged.

Scottish trawler owner John King and skipper Anthony True pleaded guilty in court last week of fishing for king scallops in Manx waters without a permit.

They were fined £5,000 and £12,000 respectively and the vessel’s sea fishing licence suspended for a period of three months of the king scallop fishing season.

The prosecution was hailed by DEFA Minister Geoffrey Boot as sending a strong signal about the government’s ’zero tolerance’ approach to violations of its fishery legislation.

But now it has emerged that Mr King of West Coast Sea Products Ltd, which owned the vessel involved, is a current member of DEFA’s Scallop Management Board, which advises the government on measures to protect the fishery.

He is the second member SMB to be fined for recent illegal fishing. Melvyn Reid was fined £5,000 by magistrates earlier this year for breaching the king scallop curfew.

Mr Reid was a member of the board at the time of the offence but resigned before he appeared in court.

The boat owned by Mr Kings’ company, the 21m Kingfisher BA810, exceeded the maximum size of 15.24m permitted for vessels fishing within the first three nautical mile limit.

Monitoring system data showed it had been fishing 650m inside that limit.

It is understood that the SMB has written to Mr King in connection with his position on the board.

A policy to suspend or cancel licences, where there is reasonable grounds to suspect that an offence may have been committed, was introduced last month in a bid to tackle misreporting of catches.

It replaced a ’report to port’ system that was temporarily introduced at the start of the year but then abandoned in an embarrassing U-turn following pressure from the Scottish government.