The criminal court in Hasselt, Limburg, on Monday sentenced two men in absentia to four years in prison for human trafficking and irregular recruitment.
The defendants, a 31-year-old from Heusden-Zolder and a 39-year-old of Turkish origin, were accused of hiring six people from Eastern Europe between April and October 2020 without declaring them to Social Security and hardly paying them.
The two men used three fictitious companies in the construction and painting sector to make their employees and their main client believe that everything was legally compliant. However, for several months, they paid no social security contributions and their employees were only paid randomly.
“The facts established are very serious,” the judge argued. “These are serious abuses of the employees, who were mistreated, threatened and barely paid.”
The unpaid wages amount to more than €70,000.
Absent from their trial, the two defendants are no strangers to the law. In 2022, they had already been sentenced to eight and six years’ imprisonment by the Liège Court of Appeal for the attempted murder of a Bulgarian national in Malmedy in October 2020.
The defendant residing in Heusden-Zolder has been convicted no fewer than 24 times by the courts, mostly for carrying a prohibited weapon and for driving offences.
