President Dr. Mohamed Muizzu has decided to impose fines on employers negligent towards foreign workers, take further action for repeat offences and disclose a list of offending companies.
The President made the decision based on advice from ministers after deliberations at Sunday’s cabinet meeting on a paper presented by the Home Ministry.
After the cabinet discussion on solving the problem of undocumented migrant workers, the President also decided to collect fingerprint scans and facial recognition of all expatriates in the Maldives and to conduct a regularisation programme.
In addition to the regularisation programme, the cabinet also decided to offer Assisted Voluntary Return (AVR) for undocumented workers who wish to go back to their countries.
The cabinet also decided to submit revisions that the government plans to make to the employment law in order to solve the problem of undocumented workers.
The problem of undocumented workers will be solved within the next three years, Home Minister Ali Ihusan said last week.
Police and immigration have been conducting a special operation dubbed “Kurangi” for the purpose. The government recently expanded the operation and developed an application for the effort.
The application was created to enable access to information about all foreign workers residing in the Maldives. All island and city councils will be authorised to use the application, Minister Ihusan said.
The timeline for identifying 100 percent of expatriates is one year with regularisation efforts to be carried out over the next two years, Ihusan said.
