For their involvement in a fake degree scam, at least 18 foreign
workers from China were sentenced earlier this week to jail in
Singapore for four weeks each.
The workers had been found by a local court to have provided
forged certificates to obtain work passes to work for T Y
Enterprise and Sun Blues Cleaning Maintenance.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) said that while
another 10 workers from China will be charged with similar offences
on Thursday, another nine are being repatriated after being served
with warning letters “for providing false information to MOM’s
employment inspectors”.
Arriving in Singapore early last year, the 37 Chinese nationals in
all had applied for employment and S passes with “university
degrees” in hotel management from Jiangsu, Shandong and Henan
universities.
While the workers knew their degrees were fake and had lied in
their applications for employment passes, they claimed they had
little choice after having paid S$8,000 each to agents in China to
land a job here.
However, the promise of a high-paying job was dashed after they
found themselves scrubbing floors and clearing rubbish. It is
understood that some of them were farmers back home and had landed
jobs as cleaning supervisors.
The three universities mentioned do not offer a degree in hotel
management and that the degrees were fake, The New Paper
reported.
Meanwhile, the employers who were involved in hiring the workers, a
total of 17 men and 1 woman, will be charged in court at a later
date.
One of the workers, Liu Demin, 36, had pleaded to the court for
leniency when his case was heard on Tuesday, saying that he had
paid a substantial amount to the agent.
Speaking to the court interpreter in Mandarin, he said, “If I did
not follow his instructions (about the forged degree certificate),
I would not get the money back. I have to support sickly parents
and two school-going children.”
In June this year, the same paper had reported that Liu and another
worker, Wang Kangxun, 31, had complained about the unusual pay
practice adopted by their company.
It was this issue which shed light to the fake degree scam.
The workers were each paid a monthly salary of S$2,650 which was
transferred into their bank accounts, but after payday, they each
had to return around S$1,600 to a man sent by their employer. They
claimed not to have known why there were asked to do that.
For an S pass holder, the worker must have a fixed monthly salary
of at least $2,000, and at least a degree or diploma while the
minimum salary for Employment Pass holders is $2,800.
While such scams are not new, non-governmental group Transient
Workers Count Too (TWC2) said this is the largest case of employers
using workers with fake certificates. Its spokesman alleged that
the employers use the scam to get around the dependency ceiling
imposed by MOM.
For making false declaration in a work pass application, the
Chinese nationals could have been fined up to $15,000 and/or
sentenced up to 12 months’ jail.
-- Yahoo!
