Dozens of workers from around the world may have been trafficked into the UK to work for a small family-owned Scottish fishing firm, a BBC investigation has revealed.

Thirty-five men from the Philippines, Ghana, India and Sri Lanka were recognised as victims of modern slavery by the Home Office after being referred to it between 2012 and 2020.

The workers were employed by TN Trawlers and its sister companies, owned by the Nicholson family, based in the small town of Annan on the southern coast of Scotland.

The TN Group denied any allegation of modern slavery or human trafficking and said its workers were well treated and well paid.

The company was the focus of two long-running criminal investigations but no cases of human trafficking or modern slavery have come to trial, although some of the men waited years to give evidence.

While TN Trawlers’ lead director, Thomas Nicholson, was under active investigation, TN Group companies continued recruiting new employees from across the world.

Experienced fisherman Joel Quince was 28 when he landed at Heathrow Airport in 2012, thrilled to have secured a job as a deckhand with TN trawlers.

Joel had a young family back home in the Philippines, thousands of miles away. He had been expecting to earn a good income working in the UK. He was to be paid $1,012 (£660) a month for a 48-hour week.

He caught a bus from London to Carlisle, where, he says, he was picked up by the owner’s son, Tom Nicholson Jr.

“On our way to go to the boat he told us: ‘You have to give me your documents’ – so without hesitation I gave all my documents to them,” he said.

Joel says he was then taken straight to the fishing ground to start working.

But he was surprised to find that his boat was the Philomena rather than the Mattanja, which was the only vessel he was authorised to work on under the terms of his visa. “This was already something fishy for me,” he said

He claims that instead of the 48-hour week he had been told about, he was working 18 hours a day, seven days a week while the Philomena was out fishing.

On his monthly wage of £660, it meant Joel was earning less than the UK minimum wage – although at that time there was no legal requirement to pay it to fishermen like him.

Joel was one of about 30 seafarers who arrived in the UK to join TN Trawlers between 2011 and 2013, mostly from the Philippines. They joined dredgers trawling for scallops along the UK coastline.

These dredgers, built in the 1970s and 80s, work by towing metal nets along the seabed. They scrape up shellfish, as well as stones and bycatch – the other marine life which gets caught in the nets. Deckhands throw back the stones and pack the scallops in ice below deck.

Several of the men the BBC spoke to had little or no fishing experience. All describe working shift patterns as gruelling as Joel’s or worse.

Joel said he struggled to get up to go to work because he was so exhausted – but he didn’t complain because his colleagues were also suffering.

“If I stop working, there’s three people suffering, not getting their rest, because the operation keeps continuing. They won’t stop.”

He said there was not enough drinking water on board the vessels, and the crew were reduced to eating tomatoes from the stores to wet their throats. He also said that on one occasion a skipper threw an empty Coke can at the crew.

All the men the BBC spoke to described shortages of proper clothing, food and water.

Jaype Rubi was a young Filippino when he worked on board the TN dredger Sea Lady in 2012.

“Picking up and throwing out rocks is really tiring,” he said.

“The boat had CCTV, so the skipper could watch us. If we stop, he’d pull down the window and say: ‘Why are you resting’?”

Jaype said it was “super cold” and there was not enough food.

When he spoke to his mum on the phone, he started crying. “I said: ‘I want to go home because it’s a nightmare working on that boat’.”

Jaype said he was subjected to verbal abuse and was treated “like a slave”.

Other men said that, despite arriving in the UK on 48-hour transit visa, they were told to work onshore in the TN yard at Annan, in breach of their visa entitlement.

One man, Jovito Abiero, told the BBC he was sometimes sent to the home of the company owner Tom Nicholson to do gardening.

On 22 August 2012, Joel was aboard the Philomena off the coast of Northern Ireland during rough weather.

He was fixing a broken link in the metal nets when the towing bar swung up. He leapt out of the way – but fell and hit his head on the deck.

His crew mates estimated he was unconscious for up to 15 minutes.

When Joel woke up with a bandage on his head, he asked his skipper – Tom Nicholson Jr – if they were going to hospital.

“He said: ‘No, we’re not going to the hospital. We continue fishing’,” said Joel.

Joel was given paracetamol by the skipper and his head was bandaged. The Philomena didn’t turn around and head for the port of Troon in Ayrshire until 11 hours after the accident.

Joel got off the Philomena, never to return. He found support at the Fishermen’s Mission, a harbourside charity that supports seafarers.

At that time the mission was run by two sisters, Paula Daly and Karen Burston, who helped Joel get medical help. They had been hearing rumours about TN boats for some time.

“In 2012, it became really quite abundantly clear that we were getting the same message from quite a few different crew,” said Paula.

“There were so many things that were so wrong,” added Karen.

Police forces on several UK coasts had long been aware of allegations about TN Trawlers.

The company had been prosecuted in 2007 for illegal catches worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. Tom Nicholson and TN Trawlers were ordered to pay £473,000 under proceeds of crime laws.

They were also ordered to pay almost £150,000 in fines and costs after the Maritime and Coastguard Agency found a string of defects and safety breaches on vessels between 2009 and 2011.

A 2012 police briefing, seen by the BBC, also noted six Filipino fishermen swam ashore from TN boats and complained of mistreatment.

That year, police in Dumfries and Galloway launched Operation Alto, an investigation into human trafficking and labour abuse at TN Trawlers.

Eighteen former TN Trawlers employees – including Joel – passed into the Home Office’s National Referral Mechanism, a system which identifies and supports victims of human trafficking.

File on 4: Invisible Souls

Fishermen from the Philippines, Ghana and Sri Lanka speak out for the first time about how badly they say they were treated by a Scottish fishing company.

Listen on BBC Radio 4 at 20:00 on Tuesday 20 August or on BBC Sounds.

Modern slavery is a term that can encompass human trafficking and slavery, servitude and forced or compulsory labour.

The Home Office defines the essence of human trafficking as a situation where a person is “coerced or deceived into a situation where they are exploited”.

Under this guidance, the men were all given recognition by the Home Office that they had been trafficked.

They were taken to a safe house somewhere in Scotland, then police asked them to stay in the UK to help with further enquiries and act as witnesses when the case came to court.

TN Trawlers continued to recruit, switching its main recruitment operation from East Asia to West Africa.

In June 2013, Gideon Mensah from Ghana signed up to work on the TN scalop dredger Noordzee. He said he soon found himself in the same situation as the Filipinos – overworked and undernourished.

Gideon told the BBC his wages were diverted to his recruitment agent back home, leaving him with £50 cash in hand each month – just £1.66 per day.

He was later recognised as a victim of modern slavery by the Home Office and spent several years on file as a witness for forthcoming prosecutions.

In 2017, five years after Joel Quince stepped off the Philomena at Troon harbour, 25-year old Vishal Sharma left India and arrived in London on a transit visa.

He’d signed a contract with a different company to work in the engine room of a Belgian tanker for 15 months.

But his agent in India then told him to travel to a different meeting point in the south of England, and he was taken to the Noordzee.

“I asked: ‘Why am I working there? It’s not my ship… I am not a fisherman’.”

Vishal claims he was threatened with deportation if he didn’t comply.

He spent three weeks on the trawler and says he was never paid.

He claims he worked 22-hour days, had little food, and that his boots began to fall apart in the seawater.

Men continued to arrive from Ghana, including Augustus Mensah and Gershon Norvivor. They both described being put to work in the Nicholsons’ compound before being shipped out, and both ended up working on a vessel called on the Sea Lady.

The BBC has seen payment schedules given to both men upon employment. Both were to earn £850 per month, with an additional cash payment of £50.

Based on a 48-hour working week, they would receive £4.68 an hour.

The conditions they alleged were similar to those described to the BBC by the workers from 2012.

“We were short of food and short of water,” says Gershon.

He claimed deckhands would drink washing water from the ship’s rusty tank. When the tank was empty, they’d melt the ice used to pack the scallops.

“We went to the fish room with a bucket or a sack and you put an ice block in… you put it on the stove… and the guys would make coffee with it.”

On 6 December 2017, a dredge net full of scallops swung and crashed into Augustus’ head and knocked him out. Gershon did what he could to help his friend, rinsing away the blood.

The crew managed to get word to the police onshore in Portsmouth.

“When we were rescued by the police we were very happy,” said Augustus.

Augustus, Gershon and Vishal, along with six other crew members from Ghana, India and Sri Lanka, were taken into the National Referral Mechanism system and recognised by the Home Office as victims of modern slavery. They were asked to stay in the UK as potential witnesses in the ongoing investigation into Thomas Nicholson Snr and TN Trawlers.

After a five-year wait, the case was dropped after some of the men failed to identify suspects during an identity parade.

In a letter from the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) this year, Vishal was told that, while prosecutors said there was evidence a crime had been committed, there was not enough evidence to prove the identity of the perpetrator.

The Filipinos’ case finally reached Hamilton Sheriff Court in October 2022, some 10 years after the men were removed from the boats.

Thomas Nicholson Snr and TN Trawlers pleaded guilty to failing to get adequate care for Joel Quince. The Crown accepted his not guilty plea to withholding some of the Filipino crewmen’s passports without reasonable excuse.

Despite the Home Office’s conclusion that the men were trafficking victims, the case did not involve charges of trafficking or modern slavery.

Thomas Nicholson Snr was fined £13,500 and ordered to pay Joel £3,000 in compensation.

Text message exchanges between Nicholson Snr and the vessel’s skipper Tom Nicholson Jr on the day of the accident were read out in court, in which the father instructed his son not to take Joel ashore for medical treatment.

After hearing the messages, Joel told the BBC: “He was a devil with a human image. He doesn’t see me as a person… he doesn’t see us.”

Thomas Nicholson Snr was the director of TN Trawlers, TN Enterprises, Sea Lady Trawlers, and Olivia Jean. The companies owned at least six scallop dredgers.

A spokesman for TN Group said it disputed suggestions that workers were mistreated.

It said it always provided food and accommodation to workers and that they were “always free to come and go when ashore”.

He said: “The overwhelming experience of our workers was that they were well treated and well remunerated. We dispute many of the accounts put to us, in some cases over a decade on.

“We absolutely refute any allegation of modern slavery or human trafficking and our many testimonials and long-term employees are testament to that.”

He said the company regretted the delay in bringing Joel Quince ashore for medical treatment.

“We fell short on that occasion. We have accepted responsibility, compensated and we apologise to that individual,” said the spokesman.

“Working conditions on the high seas, sometimes in dangerous waters and in a confined environment, are extremely difficult.”

The Crown Office said it was fully committed to tackling human trafficking.

“We recognise that the time taken in dealing with these complex and challenging matters has been difficult for those affected,” said a spokesperson.

“COPFS deal with every case on its own individual facts and circumstances and takes action where it assesses there is sufficient admissible evidence that a crime has been committed and it is in the public interest to do so.”

Life after TN Trawlers has seen mixed fortunes for its former crewmen.

Many of those involved in Operation Alto have had their permission to remain in the UK extended, some indefinitely. This enables them to work in the UK and support their families – something they had always wanted.

The men from Ghana interviewed by the BBC have seen their leave to remain expire, meaning they face the possibility of leaving the UK.

However, all the men spoke of their bitterness at working for the company – and their experience of the justice system in the UK.

Joel Quince said his eyes had been opened.

“I see now how it works,” he said.

“This is how your UK law is done… You favour the wealthy people, and you don’t care about the poor.”

Additional reporting by Rachel Coburn and Anton Ferrie