Witness claims over 100 Mihin workers were not paid for nine months 

Ingrid Guruge arriving at the Presidential Commission of Inquiry (pic by Jude Denzil Pathiraja)

 By Rathindra Kuruwita -July 5, 2018, 12:04 pm

Over 100 staff members of Mihin Lanka worked without being paid for nine months, from April 2008, and never received compensation for that period, Ingrid Guruge former Head of inflight /Ground operations at Mihin Lanka told the Presidential Commission of Inquiry (PCoI) probing irregularities at SriLankan Airlines, SriLankan Catering and Mihin Lanka yesterday. 

 "We stayed on because we believed that the new management would be able to change things. At this time Anura Bandara replaced Sajin de Vass at the helm of the airline. However, we were not compensated for the period we worked without any leave."

 It was, however, not revealed how much Mihin Lanka had to pay its employees in arrears.

 Throughout the operation SriLankan Airlines staff handled the ground operations for Mihin Lanka although Mihin had a separate team of 30, under Guruge, as ground staff. 

 "Initially, there was no concession for what they did and on December 31, 2007, they stopped providing us ground operation services due to a delay in payments. However, since we had a full flight to Bangkok the following day, we did everything manually. Our engineering staff had to

physically push the A 320 plane to the runaway.

I have been working in airlines since 1979 and I had never heard of any such thing," she said.

In March 2008, Mihin purchased a second hand German made ground service equipment, however, their staff never got the opportunity to use them, she said. 

 "The management ordered the equipment believing that SriLankan would let us do our own ground operations. The negotiations were ongoing but SriLankan didn’t want to give us that because then all airlines would have asked for the same. So ultimately the imported equipment was used by SriLankan staff. They gave us a concession because they used our equipment."