Foreign employment agencies on Tuesday claimed that high-ranking officials of Ministry of Labor and Transport Management (MoLTM) are involved in the Moondrops Overseas scam and demanded the concerned authority to annul Moondrops’ workers selection process.

“The entire procedure of calling candidates for interview, selection and even the use of quotas by Moondrops Overseas has lacked transparency. We demand that the whole procedure be made transparent or else the present selection be cancelled,” said Hansha Raj Wagle, general secretary of Nepal Association of Foreign Employment Agencies (NAFEA).

Speaking at a press meet at Reporters Club on Tuesday, he clarified that the authority of granting such permissions lay with Department of Labor and Employment Promotion (DoLEP) and not with MoLTM.

“Sending workers to Korea has always been a big issue and we should be wary that we should not lose such a lucrative market,” Wagle added.

According to regulations, a manpower agency on receiving foreign job quota needs to notify the DoLEP first. The department then decides on whether to give prior-permission to the manpower agency. The manpower agency can publish the notice about foreign job vacancies in national dailies only if it gets the green signal from the department.

The advertisement, inviting candidates for the interview was published in Himalaya Times, a Nepali national daily on April 29, which was not available in the market.

Further, the interviews of more than 1,300 people in a single day raises questions over the selection criteria, he said. There was no satisfactory reply from the MoLTM and Moondrops overseas on the issue despite queries raised by the NAFEA, Wagle informed.

Manpower agents urged the concerned authority not to remain silent when a manpower agency has been trying to extract large sums of money from poor workers just because they fear the country might lose Korean job quotas.

However, the sources at the Ministry of Labour and Transport Management (MoLTM) denied collusion with the Company.

Meanwhile, reports quoted Prasiddha Rana, director of Moondrops Overseas, as refuting the claims that it bought all the copies of April 29 edition of the newspaper on which the notice was printed.