Labor Ministry plans to crack down on work visa sellers

JEDDAH: The Labor Ministry, as part of its efforts to regulate the labor market and create more job opportunities for Saudis, is studying the prospects of taking legal action against those who sell work visas to expatriates.
“We’ll hand over suspects involved in visa trade to the Bureau of Investigation and Public Prosecution and demand their imprisonment,” said Labor Minister Adel Fakeih in comments published on Sunday.
“We shall take legal action against those who forge documents to get visas for the purpose of selling them,” the minister said.
“If this issue has taken the form of human trafficking, tougher punishment would be given for those involved in such illegal activities that are monitored by the Ministry of Interior,” he explained.
Fakeih said the newly established recruitment companies would start their work within the next few weeks. “We have set up a special department to serve them and monitor their activities,” he said. Fakeih said studies are still under way on the proposed plan to streamline recruitment of expatriate workers from six countries.
“We have contracted with a consulting house for this purpose and the study will take five months to complete,” he added.
The ministry is studying prospects of imposing the Nitaqat system on the public sector with the support of the Civil Affairs Ministry, he said.
“The purpose of introducing this system in the public sector is that when a government department applies for recruitment of foreign workers it should make sure whether there is any qualified Saudis to fill that position,” he said, adding that 90 percent of employees in the public sector are now Saudi.
Fakeih denied reports that the ministry had canceled the plan to update information about beneficiaries of the Hafiz unemployment program. “We’ll continue to update Hafiz information every week, and there is no plan to make it monthly,” he added.
Meanwhile, the Hafiz program has removed the names of about 700,000 Saudis from the list of beneficiaries who received the unemployment allowance of SR 2,000 after it was noticed that they did no fulfill the necessary conditions.
Sultan Al-Saree, spokesman of the Human Resource Development Fund, said the total number of applicants for Hafiz allowance reached about 2 million.
The number of Hafiz beneficiaries in the month of Shabaan reached 1,333,964. According to Hafiz regulations, at least 554,000 of them would be removed from the list after three months.