Humanitarian Disaster

Australia's biggest construction group stands accused of not paying hundreds of foreign workers and expats in the Middle East, in what has been described as a humanitarian disaster.

CIMIC — formerly known as Leighton Holdings — has had a scandal-prone history involving major bribery episodes. But the allegations at the centre of this investigation were of a different kind: hundreds of workers, many of them from developing countries, had been left without pay, without repatriation, and without recourse.

Adele Ferguson's investigation, published in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald and broadcast on ABC 7.30, drew on interviews with affected workers and their families, documents obtained from multiple jurisdictions, and testimony from insiders who described a company that had abandoned its obligations to the most vulnerable people in its supply chain.

The workers — construction labourers, engineers, and support staff — had been employed on major infrastructure projects in the Middle East. When the projects ended or were cancelled, CIMIC had failed to pay outstanding wages, repatriate workers to their home countries, or provide the support they were entitled to under their contracts.

Some workers had been stranded for months, unable to leave the countries where they had been working, unable to support their families at home, and unable to access legal remedies in jurisdictions where their rights were poorly protected.

The investigation prompted calls for stronger regulation of Australian companies' obligations to workers in their overseas supply chains, and for greater accountability for the conduct of Australian corporations operating in countries with weaker labour protections.