Two gangmasters jailed for exploiting workers

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/dec/19/gangmasters-jailed-exploiting-workers

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Two Latvian gangmasters who intimidated migrants into performing backbreaking labour for as little as £1 a week have been jailed.

Prosecutors said Ivars Mezals, 28, and Juris Valujevs, 36, used fear and debt to exploit migrant workers who picked leeks, cabbages and broccoli in Cambridgeshire.

The nine-week trial at London’s Blackfriars crown court heard how the pair systematically exploited, manipulated and intimidated their victims.

The judge David Richardson said: “There is a message in this case for everyone involved in the supply of migrant workers in the fields and processing and packaging plants of East Anglia. If you do not have a gangmaster’s licence you must not supply workers, either directly or indirectly. If you do you face the prospect of an immediate prison sentence.”

He urged farmers and factories to be alert to the problem and not to recruit workers from unlicensed gangmasters. “Farmers and producers themselves all need to hear that message. To make arrangements with unlicensed gangmasters is a serious criminal offence,” he said.

Mezals, of Wisbech, and Valujevs, of Kings Lynn, were found guilty of acting as gangmasters without a licence between January 2009 and October 2013. Mezals was sentenced to 18 months in prison and Valujevs to 16 months. They are expected to be released within months because of time spent on remand and on qualifying curfew.

Jurors heard that migrant workers, mainly from Latvia and Lithuania, travelled to the UK voluntarily. They signed up for work via Mezals and Valujevs under the promise of regular well-paid jobs, decent accommodation and the “hope of a better life”.

But they were forced to live in cramped, dilapidated homes, pay double the going rate for rent and pay fines for “fanciful” reasons including smoking. Prosecutors said the gangmasters withheld work so their victims would rack up rent debts that could be used to exploit them.

Those who complained were told that if they didn’t pay, “your life will be ended like Alisa’s” – a reference to Alisa Dmitrijeva, a Latvian teenager found murdered on the Queen’s Sandringham estate in 2012.

Richardson said he thought the men had exploited their workers but he did not believe they kept them in debt bondage. He said: “I emphasise that this case, unlike some others that have appeared in the press, is not concerned with human trafficking, it is not concerned with modern slavery.”

He said he was sure that the pair had made between £50,000 to £100,000, and the “gains may have been higher”. A Proceeds of Crime Act hearing to claw back money made from the enterprise will be held at the same court on 13 March.