A Sydney labour hire firm has been ordered to pay more than $670,000 over its use of a sophisticated phoenixing operation to underpay foreign workers and treat them like “slaves”.
The Federal Court on Wednesday ordered Grouped Property Services, which provides cleaning services, to pay near-record penalties of $447,300 and backpay of $223,244 to 49 employees after a three-year Fair Work Ombudsman investigation exposed the scheme.
Former GPS director Rosario Pucci, an undischarged bankrupt whom Justice Anna Katzmann found was “intimately involved” in the exploitation, set up a second-tier shell companies which engaged cleaners under ABNs to avoid paying minimum wages and entitlements.
Cleaners, many of them long-term unemplo…
Read the full article at: http://www.afr.com/news/policy/industrial-relations/fair-work-ombudsman-secures-nearrecord-fines-over-phoenix-scheme-20170607-gwmahy