The Authorized Foreign Employment Agency (ALFEA) is an institution established under the Foreign Employment Bureau Act No. 21 of 1985 and the Extraordinary Gazette Order dated 31 March 1988.
The Authorized Foreign Employment Agency (ALFEA) has recently revealed that there is a racket in Sri Lanka of smuggling underage women with underage children and proper training to the United Arab Emirates on tourist visas.
That was during a raid carried out at the Katunayake Bandaranaike International Airport recently. According to the Authorized Foreign Employment Agency (ALFEA), the smuggling of Sri Lankan women into domestic service is taking place in two ways.
One way is to bring in a tourist visa and work in a foreign country. In particular, the Middle East is one of the leading destinations for domestic workers on a visit visa, with most leaving Dubai. The smugglers pay more than 120,000 rupees in bribes to airport premises officials, including officials of the Foreign Employment Bureau, for each woman who travels abroad illegally.
The other method here is the Re Entry method. What happens here is that a newly obtained passport is forged, registered with the Bureau of Foreign Employment and sent abroad in order to evade government regulations. Forging not only rubber stamps of local government institutions but also foreign stamps is a serious problem in the processing of these fake passports and such stamps include Immigration and Emigration stamps and Visa issuance stamps. If this scam is exposed to the relevant foreign countries, the trust in Sri Lanka will be damaged and those countries will inevitably stop receiving workers from Sri Lanka.
The officials of the Bureau of Foreign Employment say that there is a group of officials behind the racket of selling women to foreign countries by preparing such fraudulent documents. The main center of this racket is the North Western Office of the Bureau of Foreign Employment in Kurunegala.
We state responsibly that a group of its officials are directly involved in this.
Following the disclosure of this information (ALFEA), the chairman of the organization Fairous Marikkar was assaulted by a gang of thugs in the Maradana area recently (04-16). Secretary of the Association of Licensed Foreign Employment Agencies Says Mr. FM Arshad.
He points out that the main reason for this attack is the continued intervention of his organization in stopping the mafia from sending Sri Lankan women illegally to domestic service in the Middle East.
He further said that all the information pertaining to this racket has been provided to the Chairman of the Bureau of Foreign Employment and the Ministers in charge of the subject by his institution and the present President has also been informed about this but unfortunately no such party has taken action to stop this racket so far. Says.
He stated this at a media briefing held in Colombo yesterday (25)