HELSINKI, Finland: A Finnish court on Monday (Jun 8) handed a two-and-a-half-year jail term to a local businessman for human trafficking Thai workers to pick berries in the Nordic country.
Finnish authorities have cracked down in recent years after cases of exploitation of seasonal migrant workers in the nation’s berry industry came to light, and have accused leading companies in the sector of having formed a cartel to depress wages.
The Lapland District Court convicted the former CEO of berry company Polarica, Jukka Kristo, on 78 counts of human trafficking.
His Thai business associate Kalyakorn Phongphit was also found guilty of the same offences, but she was only sentenced to nine months in prison as she had already been handed a three-year sentence last year in a case concerning another berry firm.
The case is Finland’s largest ever human trafficking case, according to Finnish public broadcaster Yle.
The duo recruited Thai workers to pick wild berries in Finland but the court found that they misled them about earning opportunities and picking conditions.
Due to high travel and daily living costs, the workers were in debt to the company when they arrived in Finland in 2022 and “ended up with hardly any income” despite working long days without any days off, the court ruling stated.
Some of the accommodation provided to the victims “was of such poor quality, or the premises so cramped, that the fees charged for lodging were unreasonable in relation to the standard of the accommodation”, the court concluded.
The seasonal workers – most of whom had a primary school-level education and only spoke Thai – had “no other genuine alternative than to continue picking berries to pay off the debt and other expenses under the conditions imposed by the defendants”.
The court therefore found “that the picking work had become forced labour”.
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