The French construction group is the subject of a complaint from the SHERPA association filed as part of a survey on construction sites in the emirate.
Le Monde and Reuters
Less than two weeks before the launch of the Football World Cup in Qatar, a subsidiary of the Vinci group having carried out construction sites in the country was indicted on Wednesday, November 9, by a judge of Nanterre (Hauts- de-Seine) as part of a survey on the working conditions of employees on certain projects linked to the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
Vinci Constructions Grands Projects (VCGP) is notably indicted of heads of “working conditions or accommodation incompatible with human dignity”, said the lawyer for the French construction group, M
e Jean-Pierre Versini-Campinchi. “Vinci constructions major projects will immediately form an appeal tending to see the nullity of this indictment by the Versailles chamber,” he said on Monday, when his client announced in a statement his future convocation by French justice.
The French BTP group denies the accusations of “forced work” and “deals with human beings” on its Qataris projects and declares that it has built any stadium or hotel for the World Cup, saying that its Projects focused “essential on transport infrastructure”.
The file dates back to 2015, and a first complaint was classified without follow-up in 2018. But complaints emanating from Sherpa associations and modern slavery committee (CCEM), as well as seven former Indian and Nepalese employees of These projects, led to the opening of an investigation by an investigating judge in November 2019. The complainants accuse Vinci, Vinci Construction Grands Projects (VCGP), its subsidiary Qatari Diar Vinci Construction (QDVC) and their representatives, from ” Reduction into servitude, deals with human beings, work incompatible with human dignity, deliberate endangered, involuntary and concealment injuries “.
“We welcome this indictment. This is the first time that a parent company has been indicted on these foundations for the activities of one of its sectors abroad. The magistrate sends a signal Strong for economic actors: “You can be responsible for what is going on in your” “subsidiaries, rejoiced on Wednesday Sandra Cossart, director of Sherpa France.
Three projects
To organize football competition, Qatar has entrusted the realization of gigantic construction work (stadiums, roads, hotels, etc.) to an army of migrant workers. From the first strokes of drawings, NGOs denounced the working conditions imposed on these workers.
Three Vinci sites are criticized by these complainants: that of the “light metro” rallying Doha in Lusail, a new city which will host the final of the World Cup of football; that of the underground parking lots of Lusail; as well as those of the site of the luxury hotel Sheraton, in the heart of Doha.
According to the testimonies of complainants collected by Sherpa, which Le Monde had been able to consult in November 2018, the workers carried out up to seventy-seven hours of work per week under temperatures between 40 and 50 degrees, for very low remuneration. “Because of heat and humidity, I saw people vomiting, and falling like that on the ground,” said one of them. The witnesses also evoked passport confiscations, but also having been piled up in small rooms to the sanitary insufficient and threatened with dismissal or referral to their country in the event of claims.