A private firm handling immigration tasks for the UK’s Home Office has been accused of paying sex workers while deporting people abroad, The Guardian has reported.
The explosive revelation was made by five whistleblowers who claimed that the Home Office contractors regularly paid sex workers on overnight stopovers over a period of 10 years after accompanying migrants on flights from the UK.
The whistleblowers have named at least a dozen colleagues from the firm Mitie who were indulging in such an act for over a decade.
They alleged that this happened in cities including Nairobi in Kenya, Johannesburg in South Africa, Hanoi in Vietnam, Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and Bucharest in Romania.
Following the reveal, Home Office permanent secretary Matthew Rycroft has initiated a probe to look into the claims. He said that no incriminating evidence pertaining to such behaviour has been found so far.
Meanwhile, the government is facing heat from charities for allowing taxpayers’ “hard earned money” to be used for “predatory sex tourism”.
One Home Office contractor told the Guardian tht they had been shocked at what they had seen while escorting people overseas.
“On one job, two of us sat in the bar while three of the others in the team went off with [sex workers],” they said. “One had a phone which he called his ‘little black book’ specially for jobs abroad to arrange these liaisons.”
Amnesty International UK’s refugee and migrant rights director Steve Valdez-Symonds called on the Home Office to critically reassess its use of private contractors to carry out immigration tasks.
Meanwhile, Labour’s immigration spokesperson Stephen Kinnock described the reports as deeply disturbing and called on the Home Office to investigate the allegations immediately.
(With inputs from agencies)
