Some Defaults From Asia Catering Recovered: MPFA

The Mandatory Provident Fund Schemes Authority (MPFA) on Friday said it has recovered three quarters of a million default contributions from Asia Catering, which shuttered last week.

Around 100 workers say they have not been paid, and some said their firms did not make MPF contributions for a year.

Emerging from a meeting with unionists helping the workers, the authority's managing director, Cheng Yan-chee, said it was made aware in March last year that there were defaults, and responded immediately.

He said it successfully recovered some $770,000 defaulted contributions, and it's in the process of trying to recover other defaults amounting to some $810,000.

Cheng said it did not know that 16 firms that defaulted on their worker contributions were actually all under Asia Catering, until after the group closed down.

"It's only after the news that the operator had disappeared, and based on the information provided by the complainants, the employees, that we tried to piece the different companies together, and found that those companies seem to be related to this Asia Catering," he told reporters.

Cheng said the group registered some of their branches under different business addresses, and they only discovered that some of them had the same directors after the group's collapse.

He added that the MPFA has found one case of suspected forgery, as a complainant claimed contributions were said to be made in the wage bill, but there were actually none.

The Federation of Trade Unions also alleged that the group had asked workers to sign new contracts every two months to avoid making MPF contributions.

Cheng said this is among the things the authority is investigating with a dedicated team.