Thirty-eight workers in Jubail said here Wednesday that their company has still not paid them their salaries after the owner promised to do so earlier this week.

The workers, from Nepal and India, said that their salaries have been delayed by between four and six months by their company Bader Hassan Al-Hussaini & Sons.

Arab News published several stories of their plight over the past week, including an accusation that the company has done nothing to get the body of a deceased worker shipped to his family in India.

Shamsudheen Chettippadi, the Indian Embassy’s help-desk coordinator in Jubail, said embassy officials visited the 38 workers at their camp and would be communicating with the authorities and sponsors.

“We were able to find 16 of them in the camp on Tuesday. There is no information about the others. This case is pending with the Jubail labor office and the officer has asked to transfer the case to Dammam since the company representative has not appeared before him.”

However, he said that nine Indian workers were paid their salaries last week after filing a case against the company in the Jubail labor office. This came after a six-month legal battle. But these workers have still to receive their passports with exit visas, he said. Chettippadi said the embassy is communicating with the Saudi authorities to get the body of the deceased worker, Ali Hussain, transported to India. The brother-in-law of the deceased worker contacted Arab News by phone on Wednesday and rejected claims by the company’s boss that the family has not responded to requests for documentation to speed up the process.

“We have been in contact with the company since the day Ali Hussain died. We have been in touch with Bader Abdulaziz Al-Hussaini and an employee named Mohammed Ali,” said the brother-in-law.

“The company has over-complicated the issue by asking for too many documents. We have submitted everything that they have asked for since the beginning. We have been following up in vain. The company’s officials have been lying to us,” he said.

Saddam Ali Hussain, son of the deceased man, also contacted Arab News to seek support for his father’s case. He said his father came to Saudi Arabia 17 years ago as a carpenter and worked in various positions in Alkhobar and Khafji.

Saddam, a construction worker who also works in Jubail, said his father had been working in Al-Ahsa for the past four-and-a-half years. “When he did not receive his salary for four months, he and 14 co-workers filed a petition with the labor office in Al-Ahsa. He died in June before having his grievance addressed. The 14 workers received their salaries last week after a long legal battle.”

Arab News has discovered that the residence permit of the deceased man had expired while he was still alive, so the company cannot get an exit visa. An additional problem is that the Labor Ministry has suspended its services to the company so it cannot sort out this documentation to get him home.

Bader Hassan Al-Hussaini & Sons is a contract company based in Alkhobar-Dhahran Road and has projects in Jubail and other cities.