Indian clan must answer in court: Did Lake Geneva billionaires keep women as serfs?

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One impressive villa follows another. The municipality of Cologny is home to the super-rich in Geneva. The Indian Hinduja family is one of them – with a fortune of 9 to 10 billion francs, as the business magazine “Bilanz” recently estimated. According to the magazine, the wealth “comes from a wide variety of business sectors, from trucks and lubricants to banks and power plants.” In 1994, SP Hinduja Banque Privée was headquartered in Geneva.

But behind the closed doors of her 400 square meter villa, terrible things are said to have happened. The Public Prosecution Service accuses the Hinduja family of smuggling people with tourist visas from India to Switzerland and then stealing their passports. The couple Kamal and Prakash Hinduja and their son and daughter-in-law are then said to have oppressed the people, imprisoned them and held them as serfs. This is reported by the Tages-Anzeiger.

The Hindujas must appear before the Geneva criminal court from Thursday. The presumption of innocence applies to all suspects.

Employees lived in bomb shelters

One of the three plaintiffs is a 58-year-old Indian woman who worked as a domestic worker for the family from 1997 to 2018. The public prosecutor states in his indictment that during this time the woman worked every day from 7 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. without a day break. According to Swissinfo, the Indian woman received only a few hundred francs per month as wages.

She was given only the bare essentials to eat and contact outside the family was prohibited. She slept with other employees in a bunk bed in a windowless shelter under the villa.

The Indian woman would probably have lived longer under these appalling conditions – if another housekeeper had not fled and filed a complaint. In addition to the three plaintiffs, according to the public prosecutor’s office, about fifteen other people lived under similar exploitative conditions in the villa in Cologny, according to Swissinfo.

Billionaires saved 3.5 million francs

It all ended on April 12, 2018. Police arrived at the Hindujas’ property and took the family into custody. Under pressure from the public prosecutor, the family members confessed that they had violated applicable labor law, failed to pay social benefits and failed to obtain a work permit. They agreed to award the plaintiffs damages of R25,000 each.

However, the lawyers of the allegedly injured are demanding loss of wages amounting to several hundred thousand francs, as the “Tages-Anzeiger” writes. The billionaires are said to have enriched themselves with 3.5 million francs through the exploitation.

According to the newspaper, Prakash and Hamal Hinduja are described by the Public Prosecution Service as ‘repeat offenders’: in 2007 the couple had to pay a fine of 10,000 francs – due to the lack of a residence permit for domestic workers, low wage payments and non-payment of social benefits and withholding taxes. If the Hindujas are convicted again, the punishment will likely be significantly higher.

Source: Blick