The Daily Star claimed the recruitment of Bangladeshi workers was “monopolised and manipulated” via an online registration system set up by Malaysia.
It also claimed politicians and officials in both Malaysia and Bangladesh were paid bribes to ensure the monopoly would continue. Malaysian home ministry officials, the report claimed, were paid a bribe of about RM1,500 per worker.
It added that the monopoly was only cut off when the new Pakatan Harapan government took over Putrajaya.
It noted that on Oct 30, the Dhaka High Court directed the Bangladesh government to form an inter-ministerial committee to investigate “the monopoly” and submit a probe report in six months.
The Daily Star said in 2015, Malaysia’s then home minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi stated that worker recruitment would be done through the private sector instead of the government-to-government mechanism,
“During bilateral negotiations, Bangladesh had proposed the names of 745 recruiting agencies, but Malaysia selected only 10 without providing any basis for it.”
It quoted Shameem Ahmed Chowdhury, secretary-general of the Bangladesh Association of International Recruiting Agencies (Baira) as saying Bangladesh had to accept the 10 agencies if it wanted to send migrant workers to Malaysia.
The report said a Bangladeshi-born businessman was allegedly behind the monopoly, and that all 10 agencies began charging higher fees from 2016.
It gave the name of the man and said he had been given permanent resident status and the “Datuk Seri” honorific by the Malaysian government. It added this was a testament of “his importance” in Malaysia.
Baira sent a delegation to meet the man in Malaysia to convince him to break the monopoly in August, 2017, but its effort was in vain.
The Daily Star said an IT firm, Synerflux, was set up to provide online registration and that it was “the only one” that could be used to hire Bangladeshi workers.
It claimed Zahid “gave the contract to Synerflux under the Official Secrets Act in 2016”.
“Most of the employers had some level of problems in company documents, including financial reports. Therefore, the brokers had to bribe certain home ministry officials for getting the applications approved,” the report quoted a Bangladeshi broker in Malaysia as saying.
The broker claimed the bribe, on average, was RM1,500 per worker. In addition, he said, even the human resources managers of the employing companies had to be bribed for around RM 1,000.
“The agents and sub-agents in Malaysia got an average RM2,500 as commission. These transactions have no documents, but that’s the fact,” the broker was quoted as saying.
According to the broker, even the fees employers were supposed to pay the Malaysian government for recruiting workers came from the migrants.
The report claimed that the Bangladeshi with PR status shared the money he made via this monopoly with “powerful politicians” in Malaysia,
The Daily Star said Bangladesh’s expatriates’ welfare minister Nurul Islam blamed Malaysia for “the syndicate”.