By Anthony O. Miller
ALL SIX cabaret girls said they thought they knew what to expect when boarding their plane in Manila to come to Cyprus. But none envisioned fleeing for their lives after telling authorities their employer had refused to pay them anything at all.
Yesterday the six were forced to take sanctuary in the Nicosia offices of Yiannakis Erotocritou, immigration lawyer and Consul of the Philippines — in fear for their lives, they said.
While the women told their tales, Erotocritou growled their stories by telephone to the Migration Department. He wanted their boss, the owner of a cabaret in Limassol, to return the women’s passports and to pay all their back salaries.
Esther Beatty, president of the Philippine community in Cyprus, said their contract entitled each woman to £10 per day in base pay and a commission on all drinks they got bar customers to drink. The women said they never saw any of this.
In addition, though unofficially (as it was illegal), Beatty said each woman was to get £20 out of every £65 that customers paid the cabaret to take one of them home for sex. The women said they never saw any of this money either.
“They understood they would have to talk to the customers at the table, that they would be going out with customers, but they did not expect that they would be forced to go out with the customers if they did not want to,” Beatty said.
“(But) they were forced to go out… and perform whatever the customer wants,” she said, because the cabaret’s manager warned “he would kill them” if they refused.
All six women confirmed they had had sex with the cabaret’s customers for money, but said they did so out of fear for their lives at the hands of its owner and its manager.
They told the Cyprus Mailyesterday they now feared returning to the Limassol lodgings they rent from the cabaret’s owner, lest he make good on his threat to have them killed for reporting him to the authorities.
Not only did the cabaret’s owner “threaten… they would be killed” for reporting him, but — as his wife is a Filipina — he made the threat “in Tagalog, which is the language they speak. This is why they’re afraid,” Beatty added.
But the cabaret’s owner “is the one who would kill them,” Beatty said. “(He) is known to be violent… He did not actually harm them, but he did it to other girls, the Russians and the Romanians, just to show them that this will happen to them if they would not go out” with customers, she said.
“(He) is a crazy man. That’s why we are afraid of him. He’s a very violent man,” Maria, 34, said. “If he wants to make violence to you, he is a very bad story.”
When the six asked the owner’s Filipina wife for help, “she didn’t care,” Beatty said. Despite being their compatriot, “she didn’t do anything. She used to be a cabaret girl as well.”
“They have to leave Cyprus now,” Erotocritou said. “They don’t want to work there, you can imagine, after they complained against their employer.”
“I called (Migration Officer Christodoulos) Nicolaides, myself,” Erotocritou said, to ensure the women are not summarily deported on grounds of refusing to work at the cabaret, while their plight is sorted out.
While leaving Cyprus may solve one problem, none of the six women said they were looking forward to going home, lest their families learn what they did in Cyprus. But all six said financial desperation drove them to prostitution here.
“We know the business here; none of our families knows our business here,” said Maria.
“I don’t like that my family will know,” Virginia said. “We came here to give our families financial support. We will tell them a lie; we will not tell them the truth,” she said.
Meanwhile, Erotocritou said he or another of his firm’s associates would accompany the women to Limassol today to formally file their complaint there, lest they wind up arrested and deported without anything for their pains in Cyprus.
He said he was disappointed at Nicolaides for failing to keep his pledge to handle the women’s complaints in Nicosia instead of forcing them to return to Limassol.
