Ram Kumar Kamat

Wal-Mart job dream comes crashing down
Three Nepali manpower agents have duped 27 Nepali workers of NRs 4.5 million in the name of finding them jobs at the Wal-Mart Corporation in Dubai.

Left in the Indian capital, the cash-strapped workers are looking for Arjun Karki, Dhrub Raj Poudel and Madhav Neupane of the Waling (Syangja)-based Brighter Moon Human Resource Manpower Company, who had brought the men to New Delhi from Nepal 11 days ago. Karki is an employee of the Machhapuchchhre Bank office in Waling. Only yesterday did the workers come to know that the agents had cheated them. At around 1 pm yesterday, the manpower agents told five men to be ready to catch a Dubai-bound flight, while five others had instructions to be ready to board a Jet Airways evening flight. “I was ready to leave the hotel, but then agents Poudel and Neupane, who were supposed to take us to the airport, did not show up. Then we dashed to a travel agent, only to find that the agents had already cancelled our tickets,” one of the victims Pradeep Poudel said.

Instinctively, Poudel called up his friend in Dubai to know about the status of his visa, only to get the reply that the visa was fake. The agents had given a photocopy of UAE visas to three people and told others that their visas were with the company’s secretariat in Gurgaon. “That is how the fraudsters befooled us,” one of the victims Tuk Bahadur Shrestha said.

Some even went to the UAE Embassy in Delhi, where they got the reply that the visa confusion can only be cleared at the airport, where the victims came to know that their visas, employment contract, company name and addresses were all fake.

Of the 27 victims, eight are from Kaski, 17 from Syangja, while one each are from Lamjung and Nawalparasi. The group had 22 men, who had already worked in Gulf countries. “They laid their trap in such a way that we could not even suspect that they were cheating,” Shrestha said.

The victims trusted the agents also because the latter have an office in their neighbourhood. Poudel and Shrestha said almost all job seekers had receipts of the payment they have made. The individual payment ranged from Rs 1 lakh to Rs 2.5 lakh each, with those promised high-paying jobs paying higher. The agents told them they would make 1,800-5,000 Dirhams per month.

Shrestha said they were first brought to Delhi a few months ago but were taken back to Nepal nine days later when their medical certificates were ready. “I even told them we wanted to fly from Nepal, but they said we need to go to New Delhi because the employer company had a branch there and a manager was coming to Delhi to facilitate the process,” Shrestha said.

Deputy Chief of Mission Khaganath Adhikari said Karki had agreed to send money to clear the hotel bills and bring the victims back home. Krishna Gaire, marketing executive of Modern Era Tours Travels, claimed Karki will pay NRs 1.6 lakh to his central office in Pokhara today or tomorrow. “In turn, my office in New Delhi will pay the victims’ hotel bills,” Gaire said.

He said the victims wanted to go to Nepal early to catch bank employee Karki and get their money back

Published on: 17 June 2011 | The Himalayan Times