Vital issues skipped in meeting

Officials of the home ministry and the Department of Immigration and Passport yesterday held a marathon meeting with IRIS but skipped the two key issues: paying what it owes the government and handing over passports.

During the four-and-a-half-hour meeting, which began at Agargaon passport office at 1:00pm, they discussed only issues related to machine readable passports (MRPs) in Bangladesh, meeting sources said.

No official of the ministry or the DIP tabled the matter of IRIS Corporation Berhad declining to pay about Tk 50 crore it collected as passport fees from expatriates in Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

They also did not bring up the fact that IRIS was keeping 1,075 MRPs in Malaysia for months, putting the expatriates in trouble. Over the last few months, the DIP wrote a number of letters asking IRIS to pay the money and hand over the passports.

Additional Home Secretary Mostafa Kamal Uddin chaired the meeting, also attended by Director General of DIP Zeaul Alam and Project Director of MRP Brig Gen Masud Rezwan.

“Today's meeting was the right place to ask IRIS why it is not paying the money and returning the passports,” a home ministry official who was at the meeting said, requesting anonymity.

The official said the meeting focused only on the activities of the Malaysian company in Bangladesh, not the outsourcing in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Malaysia.

The government awarded IRIS contracts in the three countries that are considered key overseas employment destinations. IRIS' job was to enrol all the Bangladeshi expatriates there for issuing them MRPs before the ICAO deadline of November 24.

But the company's failure to do the job would risk the fate of at least five lakh expatriates who would not get the MRPs before the deadline, DIP sources said.

After the expiry of the deadline, the migrants have to face multiple problems, like losing their jobs and deportation.

DIP DG Zeaul Alam told The Daily Star on Tuesday that he would discuss the issues of IRIS paying the fees it had collected from expatriates and the handing over of MRPs in Malaysia.

He was silent at the meeting yesterday.

“I was present in the meeting for a short time. So, I could not discuss these matters with IRIS,” he said.

Surprisingly, some officials said the two issues were in fact not even on the meeting agenda. One of them said, “The issues were intentionally left out to protect the Malaysian company.”

Another official said IRIS did many blunders in the MRP projects and caused a lot of problems for Bangladeshi citizens at home and abroad but the meeting avoided everything. Rather, IRIS was praised for its performance, the official said.