Magistrate Carol Peralta announced today that he will conduct a visit to the Hal Far living quarters housing foreign Leisure Clothing employees on Friday, to see with his own eyes the " so called miserable" conditions mentioned by the prosecution earlier today. The visit will take place at 10am.

The Magistrate made the announcement during yet another sitting in the compilation of evidence against Bin Han, 46, and Liu Jia, 31, the Managing Director and Marketing Director of the Chinese company, who face a total of nine charges, including the human trafficking of nine Vietnamese persons for the purposes of labour exploitation, misappropriating money owed to them and failing to comply with employment regulations.

Earlier, Vice Squad Inspector Sylvana Briffa said officers had visited the Hal Far site during the course of the investigation and found that the foreign employees of Leisure Clothing were living in squalid conditions. Investigators, she said, had found that conditions were cramped and miserable. Employees were only given one toilet paper roll a month, they did not have proper sheets on their beds and they had to hang their washing in the shower. The man gate of the compound was closed in the evening and the foreign workers could not leave. Some changes have been made since the initial police visit.

It also emerged during today's sitting that the Employment and Training Corporation (ETC) was given a bogus contract by Bin Han because the actual contract the company abided by did not conform to Maltese law.

The Inspector recounted how she was informed of the case and said the Vietnamese workers claimed they were promised some €600 a month. However, half the amount was deducted by the company to cover for accommodation and meal expenses. A further €150 was kept by the company to keep the workers from escaping. The Vietnamese workers said their passports were taken by a company official on their arrival to Malta and their conditions were not what they were promised. They were told that if they complained they would be sent back to their country.

Ms Briffa said Bin Han had purchased a ticket to Rome but was arrested before he flew out. The police searched his home and his computer.  During investigations, the Managing Director said an agreement with the General Workers Union allowed the company to pay its Vietnamese workers a lower wage than their Chinese colleagues but insisted that the amount paid to the former was still higher than the national minimum wage. Workers were paid for up to 60 hours of work a week but the rest were given as time-in-lieu because of the recession. The Inspector said there was no record of such thing.

Bin Han also claimed that the Vietnamese workers asked him to hold onto their passports for safekeeping. Part of their salary was kept by the company but the workers could withdraw the money at any time they wished.

The Inspector said she confronted Mr Han with the information that Leisure Clothing did not have the money to pay all employees if they all requested their salaries at once. In fact, all of the company's bank accounts were in the red. Han Bin said the company sometimes operated under a bank guarantee but admitted that it could not pay off all the money owed to employees at once.

ETC given bogus contracts

Inspector Briffa said that the contracts Leisure Clothing actually abided by were not in line with Maltese law, however, the ETC was given different contracts which showed that everything was in order. Bin Han had always denied the existence of other contracts but later admitted that they existed and said he had not mentioned them before because they did not conform to Maltese law.

It later emerged that the Vietnamese workers were given two contracts: one in Vietnamese, which promised a minimum salary of €685, and another in both Vietnamese and Chinese, which listed a much lower salary. The Inspector said the workers were lured with the first contract and were then made to sign the second one in a hurry.

A copy of the first contract - the one in Vietnamese - was found on Bin Han's computer.

Defence lawyer Pio Valletta noted that the contract was a soft copy and was not signed. He also questioned the prosecution's claim that the document was part of a communication between Leisure Clothing and Vihatico - the agency that recruited the Vietnamese workers - when it was not part of an email or letter. The lawyer also noted that the witnesses themselves said during a previous sitting that they were free to leave their accommodation block. So how could the inspector now claim that they were being locked in?

The defence then presented its own witness, Kong Jinua, an HR manager from a Chinese company that recruited Chinese workers and sub-contracted a Vietnamese company to recruit Vietnamese workers for Leisure Clothing.

Mr Kong said he had travelled to Vietnam to explain the contract conditions to the workers and none had complained. Some had accepted it and others had refused. He said Chinese workers paid €1,000 to the agency to come to work in Malta but he did not know the amount paid by the Vietnamese workers. His company charged Vihatico $600 for each worker.

The witness said he knew nothing about the Vietnamese-only contract and said all the company's contracts were written in both Vietnamese and Chinese. After being asked by the Magistrate to study the difference between the two contracts, Mr Kong said the Vietnamese contract guaranteed a minimum wage while the second only guaranteed a salary of between €350 and €500. He said he did not know if it was true that the Vietnamese were forced to sign the contract on the same day of their flight to Malta.

The witness said the company had sent over a hundred workers to Malta over the years. Magistrate Peralta asked the witness to produce a list of all the workers sent to Malta but refused a request by the prosecution to also have a copy of their contracts sent over.

Inspectors Sylvana Briffa and Joseph Busuttil are prosecuting. Lawyers Edward Gatt and Pio Valletta are appearing for the accused. Lawyers Philip Sciberras, Michael and Katrine Camilleri and Karl Briffa appeared for the workers. 

The case continues on Friday with the Magistrate's visit to Hal Far.