A construction company in Singapore is under fire for allegedly owing 48 workers tens of thousands of dollars
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The Ministry of Manpower is investigating a construction company in Singapore for allegedly owing 48 workers tens of thousands of dollars.
The foreign workers have lodged complaints against Nihal Enterprise and Nihal Construction, both held by parent company Nihal Group, between January and April this year for defaulting on their salaries.
MOM has suspended their work pass privileges and investigations are ongoing, said a spokesperson.
To date, only nine of these employees have been paid following “successful mediation” under the Tripartite Alliance for Dispute Management launched last year.
Seven of them have found new employment and one employee has decided to return home after being paid, said the MOM.
One of the workers have been underpaid for close to a year.
When asked why he did not seek help from the authorities earlier, he said that the boss kept telling workers that “this is a big company and has resources” and they should take the smaller amounts of money first.
He filed his complaint in January and has been unemployed since.
When TODAY spoke to a member of Nihal’s management team, who identified himself only as Mr Singh, he claimed his ex-employees had inflated their claims.
While he acknowledged that some of them were underpaid for working overtime due to miscalculations by payroll staff, Mr Singh accused the foreign workers of ganging up to “rip him off”.
“Some of them are the masterminds and the others are asked to follow... How is it possible that we would owe each one of them more than $20,000? Are they trying to say that they have been working for me for free,” he said.
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