Foreign tug crew still stuck in Beira

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Foreign tug crew still stuck in Beira

9:16 CAT | 20 Oct 2017

Miramar (File photo)

Foreign sailors trapped on a tug in the central Mozambican port of Beira say they have been betrayed by their employer, who has broken an agreement to pay them 50,000 US dollars in back wages.

The tug flies the Tanzanian flag but its owner lives in Iran. The crew consists of two Indians, an Iranian, a Syrian and a Bangladeshi. The tug worked on repairing buoys in the ports of Maputo, Beira and Quelimane, under a contract between the owner and Mozambique’s National Institute of Hydrography (INAHINA).

The job is finished, and the crew say they know that INAHINA has paid for the work. The tug suffered a breakdown, and is now stuck in Beira. But the owner has still not paid a penny of the year’s wage arrears which the crew say they are owed.

According to a report in the independent daily ‘O Pais’, the agent of the tug’s owner, and his lawyer, signed an agreement last week, under which the wage arrears would be paid, and the crew would be given air tickets to return to their countries.

The agent and the lawyer were expected to hand over the money and the tickets on Wednesday, but failed to show up, either at the tug or at the Beira Maritime Administration.

crew3

“This is a mafia group!”, the tug’s captain, Mahel Saharuth, exclaimed to reporters. “They have been deceiving us for more than a year, and now they are deceiving the Mozambican state with promise after promise”.

Saharuth wanted to see senior Mozambican officials “intervene with our embassies to solve this problem”.

A representative of the maritime administration, Jacinto Jamal, told ‘O Pais’ that, as mediators in the case, his office had rung up the lawyer, but the latter had told him there was still no money to pay the crew.

By midday Wednesday, “there was still nothing available to pay the wage arrears, and he was waiting for contacts from Iran, where the owner of the tug is located”.

The crew have threatened to blow up the tug and commit suicide, if their wages do not arrive. Other users of the port have taken this threat seriously enough to remove their vessels from the part of the port where the tug is at anchor.

Source: AIM