Translated material
Poisoned license
Construction company Enka is threatened with deprivation of foreign labor
The construction company Enka, whose 444 workers were recently hospitalized with signs of poisoning, may be deprived of the right to hire foreign labor. ITAR-TASS reports this with reference to the department of the Federal Migration Service for the Moscow Region. According to the agency’s interlocutor, “taking into account the fact that they (Enka. - Ed. ) did not fulfill the guarantees regarding workers and led to such consequences - mass poisoning of workers - did not provide conditions of stay, accommodation, we put the question of revoking the permission to hire foreign labor for this company.” According to RIA Novosti, all the victims are workers of the company Enka Insaat ve Sanayi AS. If this is true, then it can be assumed that the cancellation of permission to attract foreign specialists by Enka could entail serious consequences for the company - for example, a shift in delivery deadlines commissioning of facilities that are currently under construction. True, it is worth noting that the construction work on Sheremetyevo-3 is not being carried out by Enka, but by its 100 percent subsidiary Enmar. So the workers may well turn out to be Enmar employees, and then Enka is unlikely to be held responsible for what happened in this form.As you know, workers building the Sheremetyevo-3 terminal and the Ikea-Khimki Business Park were poisoned. These are mainly citizens of Turkey, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. The victims were previously diagnosed with salmonellosis, and a criminal case was opened into the incident under the article “violation of sanitary and epidemiological rules, which through negligence resulted in mass illness or poisoning of people.”
On Sunday, the chief state sanitary doctor of the Russian Federation, Gennady Onishchenko, said that Rospotrebnadzor, which he heads, together with the prosecutor’s office of the Moscow region, will consider revoking the license of the Turkish construction company Enka. “We intend to thoroughly consider the issue regarding this company and outline our position: either we will work out the revocation of the license for inhumane treatment of hired workers, among whom most are citizens of Georgia, Uzbekistan, Russia, or Enka will change its position in relation to the Russian sanitary legislation in the field of labor," he said. The head of Rospotrebnadzor noted that he has long had complaints against this Turkish company: two years ago, during the construction of a hotel in the center of Moscow, which was carried out by Enka, a mass incident was also recorded poisoning of hired workers.
The Enka company commented on the situation as follows: “The terminal construction work is being carried out not by the Enka company, but by the Enmar company.” At present, there is no reason to blame Enmar, since the cause of the poisoning has not been established. Together with the authorities, we are determining the cause of the poisoning. We have not received any warnings about the confiscation of Enmar's license. In addition, it should be borne in mind that licenses can only be confiscated by a court decision if the cause of poisoning is established, which is not the case in our case. Among the victims of poisoning, not a single person is in critical condition. They are currently under medical supervision. The first patients are recovering and, according to the monitoring doctors, will be discharged tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.”
The news about the revocation of the license of a large construction company did not excite the real estate market; moreover, representatives of various companies were quite skeptical about this information. “I think that the information about the revocation of the license is unfounded rumors,” says Yuri Yudakov, head of the office real estate department of the consulting company Praedium. -- Most likely, no action will be taken by government agencies. After all, as far as I know, the company has close ties with the Moscow government, in particular through an affiliated structure - the Mosenka company.” “The license of the company that prepared this food could be taken away,” adds Irina Dzyuba, commercial director of the development company MR Group. - The managers of the construction company will most likely get off with administrative punishment. The withdrawal of a license from a construction company occurs due to violations of technology, production process, safety precautions, environmental violations, etc. However, even in this case, revoking licenses is not so easy - the entire construction process is structured in such a way that there is an investor, a customer, a general contractor, and subcontractors. As a rule, it is subcontractors who are punished in practice. Most likely, the construction process at the Enki site was arranged in the same way. Enka's liability will also depend on whether the workers are employees of the company. If so, then the claims against Enke will be justified.”
The Turkish company Enka Insaat ve Sanayi AS was founded in 1957 and is one of the largest contractors in Russia and the world. Over 20 years of work in the Russian market, Enka has implemented 150 projects with a total volume of $4 billion. In addition, this company is one of the largest investors in Russia in the field of retail trade and office buildings. Among the company’s projects are such objects as “Towers on the Embankment” in the Moscow City complex.