RIYADH, 5 May — Authorities in Riyadh are investigating 300 establishments suspected of engaging in illegal visa trade. Most of these establishments existed only in paper and their sole objective was to obtain visas in large numbers to import foreign workers, according to an official at the Labor Office in Riyadh.
He said after obtaining the visas, these firms sold them at very high rates to foreigners who wanted to enter the country to seek jobs. They used expatriates as agents for their illegal operations.
Hamad Al-Hadithi, director of the Riyadh Labor Office, said his office had handed files on these establishments to concerned authorities to take penal action. If found guilty, the firms face deletion of their names from Labor and Passport Department computers and a ban on labor import for at least one year.
Most of these companies were licensed to operate in construction contracting, the official said.
The office discovered the foul play following an investigation after it received an unprecedented number of visa applications from some contracting companies to recruit foreign labor.
The investigation showed that the companies applying for the visas had not been pursuing activities specified in their licenses.
Al-Hadithi urged commercial establishments to provide updated information about them to the Labor Office in order to avoid their names being black-listed. The office has launched an aggressive campaign to identify establishments which have shifted their offices without informing the Labor Office in order to verify whether they actually needed the workers they had recruited from abroad.
Al-Hadithi said the inspection campaign would continue until all the bogus establishments were weeded out.
Ibrahim ibn Salamah, a Saudi economist, said the move was decisive in order to curb racketeering in visas which also put the expat laborers in a tight spot.
