Australia: Former café owners force Indian worker to return pay; fined

Melbourne: Indian-origin owners of a former coffee club have been fined more than 180,000 dollars in Australia for exploiting an Indian employee by forcing him to hand back his wages and threatening to have his visa cancelled if he refused.

Federal Court Judge Michael Jarrett fined Saandeep Chokhani 30,000 dollars and imposed a further 150,000 dollars penalty against the company he and his wife owned over the unlawful cash-back arrangement, Australian Associated Press reported.

Chokhani formerly owned and ran the Coffee Club at Nundah Village Shopping Centre in Brisbane with his wife.

The worker, an Indian national in his late 20s, was threatened with visa cancellation if he didn’t pay back 18,000 dollars.

The Indian worker was sponsored by a company run by Chokhani and his wife to work as a cook while on a ‘457 visa’, the most common visa for Australian or overseas employers to sponsor skilled foreign workers to work temporarily in the country.