Risk of forced labour: Malaysian MP Santiago for closer look at Bangladeshi recruiting agencies

A Malaysian lawmaker has called upon the country's government to take a closer look and delve deeper into the 25 Bangladeshi recruiting agencies and their 10 sub-agents who have been allowed to recruit workers from Bangladesh to Malaysia.

Charles Santiago, lawmaker from Klang, said it was crucial that the recruiting agencies be put under the microscope in order to lower the risk of forced labour, reports Free Malaysia Today.

"A lot of these companies have interlocking directorships, and we don't actually know who owns them," he said.

"They say it's 25 (agents), but actually it may be just two or three people, and the operations may all be under different (company) names."

"There must be due diligence by the government, and it should also be made public whether there are actually 275 separate companies or whether they are all proxies," the lawmaker also said.

The Malaysian government signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Bangladesh on December 19 to resume recruitment of Bangladeshi workers to Malaysia, which had been suspended since September 2018, allowing 275 companies to recruit Bangladeshi workers to Malaysia.

As per the MoU, the number of recruiting agents was increased to 25 while sub-agents to 250.

Malaysia's Human Resources Minister M Saravanan said the decision to allow these 275 companies to recruit workers proved that there was no monopoly, reports Free Malaysia Today.

"If we want a recruitment monopoly, we could have just kept the 10 agencies on the grounds stipulated in the old MoU. But I increased it to 275 (agents and sub-agents). There is no monopoly," the minister said.

Saravanan also said no Malaysian agencies would be involved in the recruitment process, adding that their responsibilities were "clearly spelt out" in the MoU.

The minister, however, told a news portal in an interview that he did not know any of these companies since the list of agents and sub-agents was provided by Bangladesh.

In January, the Bangladesh Association of International Recruiting Agencies (Baira) called upon the Malaysian government to provide for equal opportunity to allow its 1,600 members to send workers to Malaysia.

Baira had earlier said the 10 agencies previously chosen by Malaysia had monopolised recruitment between 2016 and 2018, according to the Free Malaysia Today report.

Andy Hall, noted independent specialist on migrant worker rights, said last week that syndicates could increase migration costs for workers.

This would, in turn, result in the workers' debt bondage and pave the way for systematic forced labour, he said, adding that it was not a rational decision to select on 275 recruiting companies, reports Free Malaysia Today.