The US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency launched another salvo in its effort to crack down on a controversial shipping route used by American Seafoods, its shipping subsidiaries and several Alaska pollock producers with a new video showing the so-called Bayside Canadian Railway in operation.

The video, submitted to an Alaska district court as evidence in the case between American Seafoods shipping affiliates Kloosterboer International Forwarding (KIF) and Alaska Reefer Management (ARM) and US Customs, shows a container of Alaska fish making its way up and then back down the 100-foot line at Kloosterboer's Bayside facility in New Brunswick -- one of the key links in The Bayside Program, as the shipping route is known.

The railway has been used by American Seafoods and other pollock producers to satisfy an exemption in the Jones Act that allows these companies to use a non-US vessel as part of what the shippers' attorney described as a "carefully-calibrated operation" to ship pollock to their customers on the US East Coast.

American Seafoods and others for years used the exemption to load pollock stored at its Kloosterboer facility in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, onto foreign-built or owned trampers, which then transport the fish through the Panama Canal to New Brunswick, where the fish are supposed to be transported over the Canada-US border to customers along the US East Coast using “through routes" over Canadian rail lines.

In submitting the evidence, US Customs' Jones Act Division of Enforcement (JADE) said the video proves that the Bayside Canadian Railway "is not part of a continuous carriage of goods."

The video has been circulating among Alaska seafood and shipping companies for weeks, sources told IntraFish, and those that had seen it called it damaging to American Seafoods and the Alaska pollock industry's efforts to keep The Bayside Program operating.

Kloosterboer Bayside at one point loaded videos of the "Trackmobile" rail operation onto its Facebook page, but those have since been removed. In its court filing, JADE officials allege the videos were removed "shortly after" the first penalties were issued.

(Click here for our full coverage of The Bayside Program saga)

US Customs began cracking down last month on companies using the program, issuing 170 citations totaling an estimated $350 million (€294.6 million) -- the highest recorded fines levied under Jones Act violations.

ARM and KIF, subsidiaries of American Seafoods, filed a temporary restraining order in Alaska federal court earlier this month to stop the CBP from continuing to levy fines against pollock producers and shipping companies over the alleged Jones Act violation.

American Seafoods and affiliated shipping companies "changed their business model to trim even more costs from their operation, flouting the law in the process," attorneys representing the US Customs told an Alaska federal court on Friday.

Prior to 2012, Customs argued, the seafood companies utilized the New Brunswick Southern Railway (NBSR) as a through route over Canadian rail lines to ship their product from Alaska to Maine and other destinations in the United States.

"Plaintiffs devised a scheme whereby instead of using an established Canadian railway that would transport their product from one destination to another, they decided to utilize a specially-built mini-railtrack, approximately 100 feet in length, that goes nowhere," attorneys said in their filing.

A hearing on American Seafoods' request for restraining order on the fine will be heard on Sept. 17.

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