A COMPANY linked to Umno president Ahmad Zahid Hamidi is among several private Malaysian companies named in an elaborate scam which allegedly took in more than Rs5 billion (RM185 million) from Nepali workers over the last five years, the Nepali Times reports.
The Nepali news site in its report “Kleptocrats of Kathmandu and Kuala Lumpur”, named Bestinet Sdn Bhd together with a few other companies backed by powerful Malaysian politicians as profiteers of Putrajaya’s revised foreign worker application process.
Besides Bestinet, which is allegedly run by Zahid’s brother-in-law Amin Abdul Nor, the report also named Kathmandu-based affiliate, Malaysia VLN Nepal and One Stop Centre (OSC), as among the companies involved in the migrant worker registration scam.
The report claimed that Zahid’s brother, Abdul Hakim Hamidi, and former home minister Azmi Khalid owned shares in the company.
Zahid, who was deputy prime minister, also held the home ministry portfolio before the fall of Barisan Nasional in the last general election.
“It all started five years ago when Malaysia’s home minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi outsourced the registration process to a private company (Ultra Kirana Sdn Bhd) which required Nepali migrant workers to apply for work visas through a Kathmandu-based affiliate, Malaysia VLN Nepal.
“The agency charged Rs3,200 (RM118) from every Malaysia-bound Nepali worker, and collected Rs1.95 billion from more than 600,000 workers between September 2013 and April 2018,” it said.
It claimed that Bestinet had partnered with Nepal Health Professional Federation (NHPF) to carry out biometric screening that charges Rs4,500 (RM167) from each migrant worker after Putrajaya made it compulsory for all Nepali migrants to undergo a biometric test in July 2015.
The report said the previous practice of applying visas independently cost a fraction of what workers had to pay to go through private companies for visa processing and biometric screening.
It said that all of the revised arrangements were put into place on an ad-hoc basis, without transparency and in the absence of any bilateral agreements between the governments of Nepal and Malaysia.
The newspaper said Nepal’s Labour Minister Gokarna Bista is reportedly cracking down on several Kathmandu-based companies set up to extort fees from overseas contract workers
Bestinet recently denied any involvement in Bangladeshi worker smuggling syndicate, saying it was not a recruitment agency nor was it involved in the operation of the foreign worker recruitment process in Malaysia or labour source countries.
– https://www.themalaysianinsight.com
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.