KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 10 — A Sarawak oil palm waste factory accused of enslaving its migrant workers has shifted blame onto job placement agents in India for igniting an international controversy after a hired hand allegedly escaped and recounted horrific details of forced labour to a Mumbai-based daily.
The management of Sibu-based CM Fibre Processing Sdn Bhd told Malay Mail Online that it was horrified by the news report, and cast doubt on the veracity of the allegations, claiming instead that some of the foreign workers it had employed were seeking to return.
“The news is too bad... So sad to see this,” CM Fibre managing director Johnson Tiu said in a series of text messages with Malay Mail Online over the weekend.
Tiu, who was abroad in Japan when contacted, suggested that the problem stemmed from issues between the worker and the Indian recruiter.
“The biggest problem is the Indian worker [got cheated] by the agent and work in place that they [sic] don’t like. [They are] working for the air ticket to go back to their hometown,” he said.
In a harrowing tale of modern-day slavery, a migrant worker from India who answered an oil and gas industry recruitment call in Malaysia claimed he was sold to a “human trafficking mafia” here and forced to labour a month in an oil palm waste factory in the Borneo state under inhumane conditions.
Lokesh Sapaliga, 27, told Mumbai-based news portal Mid Day last week how he flew to Kuala Lumpur on September 19 after being promised a well-paying job at an oil and gas rig by Ram Support Service, a placement agency based in India’s Maharashtra state, and then smuggled to Sarawak where he was forced to work for up to 20 hours a day alongside hundreds of other migrant workers under close watch by heavy-handed factory guards.
According to Sapaliga, it was only after he arrived at the factory that he understood he was now among hundreds of “slaves” whom he believed to be originally from India and Nepal and forced to work in “unhygienic and inhumane” conditions.
Defending his company, Tiu forwarded Malay Mail Online screenshots of text message conversations between himself and another worker from India, whom he claimed was eager to return and work with him.
“Take a look at the message from my Indian crew. If my place is bad and I am a bad person, then why do they seek to want to return?” he asked, referring to his employees from India.
“If he didn’t know about my place, why did he want to come here?” Tiu added, this time referring to Sapaliga.
Tiu however did not explain how the Indian agents were responsible for the allegedly atrocious conditions in his factory, which included cramped accommodations in shipping containers, and lack of safety gears and medical facilities.
A check online showed CM Fibre to be a Sibu-based factory set up in 2007 to convert palm oil waste into raw fibre for export.
It is a subsidiary of the Sri Minyak Group Bhd, which was established in 1986, and had dealt with oil and gas giant, Shell in Sarawak for over 26 years.
The news report is likely to deal a further blow to Malaysia’s already dented global image among foreign workers.
In June, Malaysia and Thailand were downgraded to the lowest possible rating in an annual American report on combating modern slavery, which lifted China and Sudan from that status to a “watch list.”
However, Putrajaya argued that the US State Department had relied on “unverified information, provided by dubious organisations” in evaluating Malaysia for its Trafficking in Persons Report 2014.
