...The reimbursement process of Kawaguchi workers’ indicated recruitment fees is ongoing, and the amount of fees anticipated to be repaid to 280 impacted Kawaguchi workers is now more than 1.2 million USD.

As of February 18, 146 workers have been sent payments to their preferred account. The RBA has also provided more than 20,000 RM of food relief to the impacted workers who remained in the area.

The process has been challenging due to the need to gather all of the workers’ personal and preferred financial account details without support from Kawaguchi, the complexity of the international banking system, and verification processes for information that will allow workers to receive payments smoothly.

This is a very unique case where the factory has closed, and RBA members are no longer customers. In an effort to return the more than 1.2 million USD in recruitment fees the workers paid, in violation of the RBA Code of Conduct, we had to rely on the service of a local NGO to obtain the worker information needed to get the money in the hands of the workers. This process has turned out to be complicated and getting accurate information from the workers has taken much longer than anticipated as a result.

The RBA has reviewed and tried a variety of ways to transfer the funds to the workers. Recently, the RBA learned of an alternative way to distribute the funds, which is currently being implemented with the hope that 100 percent of the fees will be returned in the very near future...