Saudi Binladin Claims to Pay Delayed Wages
TEHRAN (Tasnim) - Saudi Binladin Group, which has laid off tens of thousands of employees because of financial difficulties, said it has begun paying delayed wages to its remaining staff.
“We managed to finalize the payment for about 10,000 employees,” Yaseen Alattas, the firm’s chief communications
He added on Monday that the measure was made in coordination with Saudi Arabia’s Labor Ministry, and “we will do the same for the remaining batches” of workers when cash is flowing “from our clients,” which means the government.
Sources in March told AFP that delayed receipts from the government, whose oil revenues have dropped significantly over the past two years, left employees of the kingdom’s construction giants struggling while they wait for salaries. Saudi Binladin Group, one of the world’s largest construction companies, was also suspended by the government from new public contracts after a deadly crane accident last September.
Alattas said the government has made a commitment to pay the contractors, “including us.”
He did not specify how many other staff still need to be paid but said those fired – about 69,000 foreigners – were only a fraction of manpower at the group which built some of the Gulf nation’s landmarks.
Of those 69,000, he said about 34,000 have received salaries and been repatriated, roughly 20,000 others have transferred to other employers or resigned and close to 15,000 are “under processing.”
After decades of thriving on lucrative government contracts, the company faced unprecedented scrutiny after one of its cranes working on a major expansion of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Islam’s holiest site, toppled in September.
At least 109 people died, including foreign pilgrims, leading King Salman to suspend the firm from new public contracts.
Alattas confirmed that the sanction has now been lifted and that Saudi Binladin Group will once again be allowed to bid for government projects.
But he said the suspension, in any case, had not affected the company’s existing projects.
There were “multiple reasons” for the wage delays but one was related to “cash flow,” he said.
Egyptians accounted for a large percentage of Binladin Group employees. Some complained to the Labor Ministry in their home country that they had not been paid for three months. At that time, a well-informed source told AFP that “because of delays in payments from the government administration, several companies today have problems ... paying both their employees and producers.”
