Embattled Silviculture Operator Charged with Fraud, Forgery

The owner of a scandal-plagued Surrey company, Khaira Enterprises, has been charged with four Criminal Code counts, involving forged documents and fraud.

In addition, police say a separate investigation of a mysterious death at a Khaira camp in 2010, which has added to the cloud of trouble and suspicion surrounding the company, is ongoing.

Khalid Bajwa, owner of Khaira Enterprises, was accused last year of poorly maintaining work camps in B.C. forests and defrauding its mainly immigrant work force, subjecting workers to rotten food and racist abuse, bouncing pay cheques and falsifying Employment Insurance forms.

During June and July 2010, the period identified in the recent charges, Khaira was doing brush clearing and other forestry related work for Louisiana Pacific and BC Timber Sales. According to court documents filed in Revelstoke on Nov. 2, Bajwa used documents he knew to be forged and thus defrauded the timber firm and the government timber sales agency of over $5,000 each. The allegations are as yet untested in court.

Owner will fight charges

The forgery charges carry a maximum penalty of up to 10 years imprisonment, and the fraud charges could come with a 14-year penalty in the case of a guilty verdict, said Neil Mackenzie, communications counsel for the BC Criminal Justice Branch.

Mackenzie said the fraud and forgery charges were related to each other, with the Crown alleging that Bajwa used forged S-100 certificates in securing work contracts from Louisiana Pacific and BC Timber Sales.

The S-100 certificate is proof that a worker has completed a course in fire suppression and safety. Typically, sources in the industry told The Tyee, any work crew that runs the risk of starting a fire in B.C. woods must be made up of workers who have successfully completed the S-100 training. The training, which a Ministry of Forests website says must entail two full days of classroom and field training, is typically offered by private individuals and organizations designated by the ministry.

Despite a ruling by an Employment Standards Branch Tribunal this year that Khaira owed its former workers nearly a quarter million dollars in unpaid wages, less than half that amount has been paid out to the workers, sparking demands from the labour movement and the workers' lawyers that the provincial government, for whom the Khaira work was ultimately done, should immediately pay the outstanding wages.

Khaira's Bajwa, who says he expects to be in court again on Jan. 4, denies any wrongdoing by him or his company, and said in a Nov. 8 phone interview that he was being treated unfairly by the government. He'd not yet had an opportunity to review the court documents filed in Revelstoke or to confer with his lawyer, who is out of the country, but did indicate he would plead not guilty and fight the charges.

Bajwa said the government was holding him and Khaira to a higher standard than other firms that did contract work for the Ministry of Forests.

"I'll fight these charges in court," Bajwa said. "I didn't do anything wrong."

Bajwa said that the Employment Standards Tribunal order stating he owed his workers nearly a quarter million dollars in unpaid wages was unfair. "I gave them motels or camps, food. Every company charges like that for food and lodging. No one else has to pay for travel time. Why is the government giving me trouble?"

Denying any wrongdoing in the matter of the S-100 certificates, Bajwa described a much more relaxed procedure for getting certified than is reflected on the Ministry of Forests website, which says two full days of class and practicum are required to qualify. Bajwa told The Tyee that the certificate only required three hours of online work to be acquired by his employees.

Camp death still under investigation

The Tyee has learned that the RCMP is still investigating the mysterious death of Santokh Kooner, which occurred at a Khaira camp near Revelstoke in June 2010. Last year, Kooner's family called for an investigation into the worker's death, and told the Vancouver Sun that Bajwa had not been helpful in explaining how the family patriarch died, citing a heart attack as the cause.

But that, said the Sun, contradicted the preliminary coroner's report, which said Kooner "was found dead after a night of heavy and rapid consumption of a large amount of ethanol."

Family members told the Sun that if Mr. Kooner's death was alcohol related, they had questions about why Khaira management failed to help him.

Mr. Bajwa did not comment on the Kooner death when he spoke with The Tyee, but staff sergeant Jacquie Olsen, spokeswoman for the Revelstoke RCMP detachment, told The Tyee on Nov. 4 that the investigation into Mr. Kooner's death was ongoing. She said the process had been slowed by difficulty in finding witnesses and in some cases, trouble providing translators for some of the workers, many of whom are recent immigrants from Africa. She said she had no idea when the case would be resolved.

Mark Coleman, who speaks for the interior region of the BC Coroner's Office, said his office was waiting for investigations by the RCMP and WorksafeBC to be completed before deciding whether to conduct its own investigation into Kooner's death.

"The laying of these fraud and forgery charges are good sign that the government is taking the Khaira matters seriously," BC Federation of Labour president Jim Sinclair told The Tyee on Nov. 8. "But expansion is needed. We should be seeing criminal charges laid when workers die because of employer decisions. Just look at the Langley mushroom farm workers case in 2008. With three deaths and two lives totally destroyed, we still haven't seen serious charges laid. The system is completely broken when this can happen."

Sinclair also repeated a call for the B.C. government to pay out the remaining half of what Khaira owes its workers.

"It is a good thing that the government is going after Khaira, but ultimately, these workers were doing work for the province. They shouldn't have to wait any longer to get paid for work they did last year under terrible conditions," he said.

Sarah Khan, co-counsel for many of the Khaira workers, agrees with Sinclair about the need for the government to pay her clients. She told The Tyee that the charges laid in Revelstoke were "a good thing, and we commend them for laying the charges." However, Khan said, more charges should be laid for the unpaid wages and allegedly falsified Employment Insurance forms, and her clients should receive their unpaid wages.

"The small fine imposed on Khaira is no real deterrent," she said. "It was small enough to be just a cost of doing business. We hope to see more serious charges laid and we’d like to see our clients paid for their work.

"Many of my clients lost their housing and were put onto the streets by the long delay in getting any of their back wages paid, and because of EI forms that we allege underreported work done, clients have been unable to qualify for the employment insurance payments they deserve," she added. "Just about every one of the reporting forms we have seen fails to accurately reflect the work our clients did."