Immigration police rounded up nearly 80 Vietnamese migrant workers along with six European engineers at the construction site of a new Cambodia Beer factory in Phnom Penh on Monday afternoon because they did not possess work permits, according to an immigration official.
“After inspecting the site we found a total of 85 foreign migrant workers who all had passports but they are not permitted to work,” said Uk Heisela, chief of investigations at the Interior Ministry’s immigration department, adding that the workers were merely detained at the site.
“We found three nationalities: 79 Vietnamese, four Germans and the other two are French, all aged between 20 and 40 years old,” he said, adding that the German and French men were engineers supervising the construction, while the Vietnamese men were construction workers and welders.
“We did not arrest them as they have just come to work, so we took their passports to the immigration department to check and ordered them to register for a work permit,” Major General Heisela explained.
He said immigration police gave Khmer Brewery Limited, which owns Cambodia Beer, one month to ensure that all of the migrant workers that they employ have work permits or else they will have to pay a fine.
“If this is not implemented, we will fine them following the law,” he said.
A representative of Khmer Brewery Limited could not be reached for comment.
