An unnamed General Trading Company has been accused of charging over KD1,500 for a visa to bring in expatriate workers to Kuwait, and then not providing them with jobs but leaving them on the street to fend for themselves.
Officials of the company are to be referred to the judiciary by the Criminal Investigation Department, which has been investigating the case. The suspects are charged with human trafficking.
Case papers reveal that on receiving information of the alleged suicide by an Egyptian worker who took his life by leaping off the tenth-floor of a workers’ residence in Ahmadi governorate, officials from the Public Authority for Manpower (PAM) opened an investigation into the fall and summoned a number of the friends of the deceased.
The officials were surprised when workers revealed that each of them had paid between KD1,500 and KD1,700 for their work visas to the company, but later discovered that there were jobs with the company and instead they had to fend for themselves.
PAM officials then passed the case over to the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) for further investigation. The CID officials probing the case discovered that what the workers had said was true.