Two Latvian men exploited, manipulated and intimidated migrant workers and coerced women to participate in sham marriages to help Asian men come to the UK, a court has heard.
The two men, Juris Valujevs 36, and Ivars Mezals, 28, are accused of defrauding workers they allegedly supplied for work in the farming and processing industries in East Anglia, by withholding wages, charging inflated rents for overcrowded accommodation and imposing fines for their own gain, Blackfriars crown court was told.
Workers were typically left with only £20 a week to live on and in some cases paid less than £1 or not at all. The work involved picking vegetables and flowers and other hard physical labour.
The men are charged with acting illegally as unlicensed gangmasters and with offences under the Fraud and Immigration Acts. Together with Valujevs’ wife, Oksana Valujeva, 33, and Lauma Vankova, 26, they are also alleged to have conspired to arrange sham marriages to help non-EU citizens breach UK immigration laws. All four defendants deny all charges.
The Valujevs and Vankova, with addresses in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, and Mezals, of Wisbech, were arrested as part of Cambridgeshire police’s Operations Pheasant and Endeavour, intended to tackle exploitation of migrant workers in the area.
Opening the case for the prosecution, Gregory Perrins said the court would hear a case that involved the widespread exploitation, manipulation and intimidation of migrant workers who travelled from eastern Europe to the UK looking for a brighter future. The exploitation of women took a “more sinister form” in which they were led into debt and then coerced into sham marriages to men from India, Pakistan, and Morocco, he said.
Valujevs and Mezals ran a business promising to provide regular, well-paid employment and good accommodation, but in fact workers were put in cramped, overcrowded and dilapidated houses and charged excessive rent, sometimes £60 per week for sharing mattresses on the floor three to a room, according to the prosecution, making profits for the men of £1,000 or more for some houses. They supplied labour to other agencies but did not have a licence to operate as gangmasters.
The two men would withhold work until their fellow migrants had become indebted to them, as a way of controlling them, the court heard. They then provided the workers to four other agencies that did have licences, although three of these have since been revoked. Since Valujevs and Mezals controlled when and where the workers were employed, they were able to keep some permanently in debt, or what is described as debt-bondage, the prosecution said.
Perrins said he would be calling witnesses who would describe threats, including the threat of physical violence, made to workers who complained, and how workers were coerced into picking broccoli under false identities. He said Mezals often waited in his car outside the office of another gangmaster to whom he had supplied workers so that he could take their wages from them as soon as they were paid. Evidence suggested some workers’ wages were paid directly into his personal bank account by agencies he supplied.
Searches of the two Latvians’ properties revealed expensive cars including a 7-series BMW, telephone records suggesting the true nature of their business, and notes of debts built up by workers. The police operations involved several enforcement agencies including immigration officers, the Gangmasters’ Licensing Authority and local authority housing officers, and advice was sought from the UK Human Trafficking Centre as well as the National Crime Agency, although the prosecution told the court this was not a case involving trafficking. Workers involved had come to the UK voluntarily, mostly from Baltic states.
Describing one case of sham marriage, Perrins said a Latvian women, Dace Sera, had responded to an advert in Latvia offering regular well-paid work in the UK. Arrangements were made for her to travel to England with her two children, and on arrival she was taken to one of the houses in Wisbech controlled by the two men, where she was charged £100 a week for a room.
Mezals and Valujevs collected rent from her weekly and promised work but failed to provide it, the court was told. Over time her debt to them increased until she owed them around £1,000. They then allegedly offered her the chance of reducing the debt and being paid if she agreed to go to India to take part in a wedding. She was taken to London by the two men and by Vankova, and there she met a number of Russian men and was told that if she did not go to India to get married she would be put into prostitution, the court heard.
In the end she went to India alone, leaving her children behind, and an official wedding ceremony took place. Diaries at the Valujevs’ address show they had written down most of her debt afterwards, but when she returned to the UK she was thrown out of her house, Perrins said. British immigration officials in Delhi subsequently rejected a visa application made by the man she had married.
The jury of eight women and four men were told during swearing in on Monday that the case could take up to 10 weeks. The defence arguments are expected to be heard next month. The trial continues.
