Fishing News International's Person of the Year award is a distinction awarded to a person who has made an outstanding contribution to the international fishing industry -- and this year's recipient is richly deserving of this honor, seeing his long track record of turning around the fortunes of global fishing enterprises.

Francois Kuttel is one of those few CEOs around who knows fishing -- more than just being able to tell the back end of a boat from the front. Kuttel underwent a "baptism of fire" when he jumped into the Alaska fishing industry -- working his way up from a family owned pollock processing mothership in Alaska.

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"I knew only anecdotally about the fishing industry," Kuttel told Fishing News International [pictured here accepting the Person of the Year award from FNI's editor Cormac Burke], as his father had insisted on him studying accounting in the University of San Diego, at the time when the Kuttel family lived in the United States....