PAM transfer to Interior Ministry aims at curbing ‘visa trafficking’

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‘New approach to recruit workers … being prepared’

KUWAIT CITY, Sept 5: The transfer of the affiliation of the Public Authority for Manpower (PAM) to the Ministry of Interior is aimed at cornering visa traders and owners of dummy companies, and confronting the phenomenon of marginal labor, in a bid to cleanse Kuwait’s file in the field of human trafficking. This follows the arrest made by the Egyptian authorities, in coordination with their Kuwaiti counterpart, of a gang that deals with visa fraud.

A high-level security source said, “A new approach to recruit workers from different countries is being prepared, and the regulations are being amended to organize the recruitment process according to proportion, in a way that contributes to modifying the demographic structure. The government is determined to deal with this file radically, according to several methods, the first of which is to study the labor market and the needs of the development process, and to lay the foundations and criteria for recruiting workers for actual institutions and companies.

Method
The second method will be legislative, through partial amendment of the private sector labor law and the penal code to set strict penalties against visa traders due to the insufficiency of the current penalties. The government will not hesitate to do so”. The source said the third method involves intensifying inspection campaigns and giving the Immigration Investigations and other inspection teams the green light to monitor companies and institutions that recruit labor from abroad, and ensuring their presence in the labor sites of these companies. He stressed that it is forbidden to issue new visas to companies that do not report the departure of those whose contract with them had expired.

The source affirmed that the new conditions that will be set for recruitment include the requirement of health insurance from the private sector, not the government, and the need for a drug-free certificate and contracts that guarantee the rights of workers and the employer. He said, “The Embassy of Kuwait in Egypt suspended a number of visas that were issued recently because of a security report that some of them were forged by a gang inside Egypt seized by the Egyptian authorities. In light of the cooperation and coordination between the two countries, the security authorities in Egypt informed their Kuwaiti counterpart about the elements associated with the gang, the names of companies and power of attorney signatures. The gang is in contact and cooperation with some delegates renting commercial or fictitious licenses in Kuwait”. By Salem Al-Wawan Al-Seyassah Staff

This news has been read 34179 times!