The Embassy of India in Qatar, has blacklisted Alutech, an aluminium fabrication company, managed by an Indian from Kerala, for failing to pay salaries to at least 10 fellow Indian workers.
According to an embassy official, all the workers are from Kerala and they arrived in the country about six months ago. “They came to us a few days ago and told us that they have not been paid for the past five months,” Ramesh Chandra, second secretary in the consul and welfare section told Construction Week.
“The company has already been blacklisted by us and we are now finalising the blacklisting procedure with the Government of India as well.”
Chandra said that when the company heard of the workers complaints to the embassy, they were threatened with dire consequences.
“They have been ill treated and threatened, and have also been denied basic amenities like food and water. We will not tolerate these sort of things happening to our people,” he said.
Chandra added that one of the workers was falsely accused of an offence and handed over to the police, in order to scare the other workers.
The embassy has provided the workers shelter at its premises and asked the company to bring their passports and air tickets along with their salary arrears so they could be flown back home.
“We will also see to it that the money which was paid to the manpower agents by the workers will be returned to them.”He said that if the company manager did not listen and failed to bring the passports of the workers along with their air tickets and their pending salaries, his passport could be seized.
“People are not aware of the powers of the Indian mission here. We can and will impound the passport of this manager if he refuses to pay the arrears to the workers or tries to stop them in any way from going home,” said Chandra.
“This is news to me,” said Ravi Raghwan, deputy general manager at Alutech.
“We didn’t know that we have been blacklisted and can’t say any more at this time.”
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