Chinese men fined for harassing employer who owed them wages

TWO Chinese men were fined £250 yesterday for blocking the vehicle of their employer in protest at the fact that the man had not paid them their wages over the past three years.

One of the men gained notoriety after he climbed a CyTA tower on December 5 and threatened to jump out of desperation because of his employer’s refusal to pay his back-payments. The second man, who worked at the same Chinese restaurant and claimed he too had been denied his pay, also tried to climb the antenna but was prevented.

The man on the tower collapsed due to exhaustion in the afternoon, several hours after specialised psychologists and negotiators arrived in an effort to coax him down. The fire brigade then lowered him to safety.

But the Paphos District Court did not fine Wang Chuanjun and Li Wenming £250 yesterday for the telephone tower incident of December, but for a spontaneous act that took place two days later in the Paphos centre.

On December 7, the two men encountered their employer in the town centre and proceeded to block his car, demanding that their employer pay them for £12,500 in back-payments.

Thirty-one year old Chuanjun first arrived in Cyprus in May 2003, while his compatriot Li Wenming arrived in August 2004. The two men reportedly quit their restaurant job in August because of their employer’s failure to pay them.

Aside from fining them £250, the District Court also forced them to sign a £1,000 guarantee that they would not repeat any such incidents in the following year.

The men were charged for harassing the public, disturbing the peace and resisting arrest. The man pleaded guilty to the charges, explaining to the court the reasons that prompted them to such actions.

Penalties are normally greater for such charges, but the court gave them men lighter fines due to their situation.

On December 9, the employer had appeared on television to ‘restore his name’, where he dismissed as outrageous their claim that he owed them three years of back wages, claiming instead that he only owed each of them £1,500.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.