Ravi Arora is accumulating a fortune - and a long record of migrant exploitation - from bottle stores

Friday, 31 July 2020

Time and again, bottle store owner Ravinder Kumar Arora has fallen foul of the Labour Inspectorate for mistreating his staff. Despite 19 investigations of his businesses, he continues to run stores - and rack up complaints from staff. National Correspondent Steve Kilgallon investigates the man who may be New Zealand’s worst employer.

Ravinder Kumar Arora enjoys the good life. He drives a late-model Range Rover, lives in a $3.6m home and has property assets of over $36m, including two motels. At one stage, he owned 12 liquor stores nationwide.

The bottle stores helped amass his fortune - and his reputation as perhaps the country’s worst employer.

One of his former employees says working for him was “like modern-day slavery”.

He’s failed 19 Labour Inspectorate investigations in the past six years. He settled confidentially with one employee who claimed he was owed $80,000. Labour inspectors forced him to pay out $30,000 to several more.

And now three long serving former employees have told Stuff they were paid as little as $7 an hour while working for him, then sacked when they complained. Between them, they claim they are owed more than $630,000 in unpaid wages and annual leave. Arora denies those claims.

**READ MORE:

* Employees allege liquor baron brothers owe $400k after years of exploitation

* Liquor baron Harjit Singh shakes off rejection, strikes new deal

* The two liquor barons who have mansions and underpaid staff

* Super Liquor franchisee Nekita Enterprises 'exploited staff'

* How the liquor store industry is riddled with worker exploitation

**

Despite all of this, Arora continues to enjoy the support of the Bottle-O liquor chain. And this month, the Christchurch City Council gave a ‘temporary authority’ to a company owned by his wife Anuradha to buy another Bottle-O store in the city.

Police say Arora has pending assault charges. He is due in court again on Tuesday. When Stuff approached him at one of his stores, Arora refused to talk, wrestling a cameraman and breaking his equipment. Anuradha Arora also declined to talk, saying she was calling the family’s lawyer. The couple trespassed Stuff’s journalists from the shop.

Workers’ advocate Sunny Sehgal, of the Migrant Workers Network, says he has filed claims with the Employment Relations Authority (ERA) for two of Arora’s former staff, Dharam Pratap Bika and Harmandeep Singh, and is preparing one for the third, Navneet Singh.

“He is one of the worst employers we have ever faced,” says Sehgal. “Our government should be much harder on these employers. We are not talking about a poor business owner, we are talking about a multi-millionaire here.

“The Migrant Rights Network demands a strong investigation into him by the IRD into his wealth, when other business owners are doing the right thing and paying minimum entitlements.”

‘MODERN-DAY SLAVERY’

Along one short stretch of Great North Rd in Auckland’s Pt Chevalier, Arora owns three liquor stores, including his flagship, a Bottle-O franchise which former employee Dharam Partap Bika says turned over $150,000 in a good week.

It was where Bika worked for four years. “It’s modern-day slavery, that’s what it is,” he says of working for Arora. “He’s extremely rich, he has property and expensive cars, and he got it by exploiting migrants.”

Bika also spent a year working at Arora’s liquor store in Queenstown, and as a housekeeper at his motel, Melbourne Lodge, a breach of his visa conditions.

* Know more about Ravi Arora or the Bottle-O chain? Email steve.kilgallon@stuff.co.nz

Bika left Arora’s employment in December 2018 after he and two other exploited employees, Harmandeep Singh and Navneet Singh, confronted Arora at his Kingsland liquor warehouse demanding their unpaid wages.

“This is not just my story,” says Bika, who says he was initially paid $7 an hour, and by the time he left was being paid $10 an hour. The minimum wage is $18.90 per hour. “All the Indian people he had in his company have the same story I have, they were all paid below the minimum.”

The 11 reports on Arora’s companies completed by the Labour Inspectorate in 2019, which were released to Stuff under the Official Information Act, are damning. Each finds multiple breaches of minimum wage, employment and holidays legislation, despite Arora only supplying a fraction of the requested records.

The reports say they were initiated by a “complaint of multiple breaches” and the Inspectorate said it decided to act after having “previous interactions” with Arora and his businesses.

Arora also failed eight inspections in 2014, agreeing to an enforceable undertaking to pay over $30,000 to several former employees, a payment he made in August 2015.

Bika lodged a complaint of his own with the ERA in 2019, filing an updated version in March this year, claiming over $280,000 - $223,351 in unpaid wages, $27,095 in unpaid leave, $2600 in ‘premiums’ paid to the Aroras, and $28,000 in compensation.

He also complained to the Labour Inspectorate in May 2019. He’s dismayed there has been no verdict yet. “It is a pretty clean case, I don’t know why the Labour inspectors should take so long: it’s not a murder. I have everything on the table.”

Bika has supplied witness statements, bank statements and voice recordings to support his case. Among the taped conversations is a series of exchanges between Bika and Arora’s wife, Anuradha, and son, Himalaya.

In one tape, Anuradha Arora says: “We can’t afford to pay manager salaries for years and years, we have no profits.”

In another, she calculates how much Dharam must refund to her, saying if he has worked 45 hours, he is only entitled to $748 - just $16.62 an hour and so he must give her $200 from his paypacket. “I can’t pay you $51,000 for two to three years,” she says.

In another, her son Himalaya tells Dharam they can have a meeting in the backroom of the shop so he can hand over cash.

“I was scared to complain for a long time,” says Bika. “I have all the evidence - I gave myself time, collected all the evidence over the years and still I don’t have justice yet … imagine if I had no evidence?”

Bika’s colleague Harmandeep Singh worked for four years at Bottle-O Pt Chevalier and Bottle-O Taihape before resigning in 2018. “I was sick of it,” he says. “He treated me like s…. It had been going on for five years and I couldn’t take it any more.”

Now working in hospitality in Taupo, Harmandeep says he too was paid $7 an hour, rising to $10 an hour, and worked up to 90 hours per week.

Harmandeep says he was paid for a 40 hour working week, which Arora accepts. But Harmandeep says he worked at least double that, bringing his hourly rate down to single digits. Harmandeep also provided Stuff with witness statements from a customer and employees of a neighbouring business all testifying he had worked very long hours.

Harmandeep’s ERA claim asks for $39,555 in unpaid annual leave, $219,321 in unpaid wages and $30,080 in compensation.

In 2018, another of Arora’s employee’s, Manjinder Singh, reached a settlement over his claims of mistreatment. Singh claimed he was owed $80,000 in wages after working two months for free on trial, then for about $7 an hour after that. He claimed Arora told him he would cancel his work visa and have him deported to India if he didn’t work at the bottle store.

A statement filed by Arora in court claims that part of the settlement was a signed letter from Unite union boss Matt McCarten agreeing that Arora was now fully compliant with employment law.

Harmandeep says conditions improved after that settlement. He was paid for 40 hours, but worked 50.

“There were 50 to 60 employees [during his time there] and he treats all of them like s… and pays them all $7 or $8. Only migrants, because he knows he can take advantage of them.”

When the men confronted Arora, they say he told them he wouldn’t pay them any more and if they weren’t happy, they could leave. Bika received an email the next day saying his resignation had been accepted and he was to stay away from the stores.

A third complainant was Navneet Singh. Now back home in India, Navneet says he worked at Arora’s liquor warehouse from January 2015 to December 2018, first on a rate of $14.25 then $17 - but in reality he says he was paid $7 an hour.

Navneet says he worked 80 hours a week, seven days a week.

“He treated me very bad, as he didn’t let me take a day off even when I was sick… he said he will pay me properly after some time, but that day never came.”

Navneet believes he is owed roughly $120,000 in lost wages.

Without naming Arora, the Labour Inspectorate’s national manager Stu Lumsden says while they would use their options in the ERA to remove repeat offenders from business, it would be more effective for the major franchises to blacklist them, and major liquor companies to refuse to supply them.

“Quite simply, I would think the average New Zealander would think they should not be allowed to sell liquor if they are not treating their workers fairly.”

Lumsden says the Inspectorate is also preparing to challenge licence renewals for rogue operators. “We are always looking for levers we can utilise to get people out of business that shouldn’t be in there.”

Bika says Arora began offloading his liquor store holdings after reaching the confidential settlement with Manjinder Singh, because he was worried about more claims.

But while Arora has sold off part of his liquor empire, property records show his companies still own $36.1m worth of real estate, including the Park Lane Motor Inn in Takapuna, Queenstown’s Melbourne Lodge, the $3.6m Epsom home in which he lives, a house in Te Atatu and a string of liquor store and pub buildings in Auckland, Picton and Timaru.

He has kept his Bottle-O store in Pt Chevalier, plus two Merchants Liquor branches (also owned by Bottle-O’s parent company).

In February, Arora and his wife Anuradha incorporated a new company, Hawera Liquor Traders Ltd. In June, the company changed its name to Christchurch Liquor Traders Ltd, and the entire shareholding was moved into Anuradha’s name.

The company then applied for a liquor licence for a Bottle-O store at Lincoln Rd, Christchurch, receiving a temporary authority in early July. Police initially opposed the application, saying there were active criminal charges against Arora, but dropped the objection when he agreed not to be the primary contact for the store.

Ravi Arora did not answer questions when approached. Anuradha Arora also refused to answer questions, saying “this is not nice”. An email with a series of questions about the allegations went without response.

However, Arora’s lawyer later wrote to Stuff declining comment.

Arora has filed a formal response to the ERA against Harmandeep Singh’s claims, filing payslips and payroll reports to support his claim Harmandeep was paid his contracted rate and never worked more than 50 hours per week. Arora denied all Harman’s claims, saying he was never asked to repay money, and in fact owed Arora’s company $5200 in unpaid rent, and said the claim had been filed out of time.

BOTTLING IT

The giant Australian conglomerate Metcash owns IGA supermarkets and Mitre 10 hardware stores across the Tasman.

Through the Tasman Liquor company, it also owns the Bottle-O franchise both here and in Australia, trading under the slogan ‘Real Locals, Real Value’. Metcash chief executive Jeffery Adams is one of Tasman Liquor’s four Australian-domiciled directors.

An analysis of 25 recent Labour Inspectorate investigations into bottle stores where offending was found shows 11 of those were Bottle-O stores (eight then owned by Arora’s companies). Two more were stores owned by Arora companies under Tasman Liquor’s other brand, Merchant Liquor (Arora’s eleventh store to fail the audit was independent). Arora still retains his Bottle-O franchises.

According to its website Bottle-0 has 94 franchises nationwide, while Merchants has another 11.

Lumsden says the Labour Inspectorate’s strategy has been to encourage the bottle store industry to clean up its own act, but that Bottle-O “has been slow to engage with us, and we would like to see more effort on their part”.

He says he hopes the public “vote with their dollar as to where to shop” on the issue of worker exploitation.

Grant Simpson, the general manager of Tasman Liquor, Bottle-O’s parent company, did not respond to a request for an interview.

Instead, in a written statement he said the company was awaiting the outcome of the latest investigations into Arora, who had told them the allegations against him were wrong.

He claimed the company would do “a full audit” of its retailers and “work with them to ensure continued compliance with the appropriate labour laws and awards”.

Simpson ignored questions about Lumsden’s view that Bottle-O has been 'slow to engage' with cleaning up migrant exploitation in the industry.

Tasman’s parent company, MetCash, did not respond to questions about Bottle-O’s record and whether it was being a good corporate citizen.

Meanwhile, Ravi Arora continues to trade.

Correction: The Christchurch City Council has issued a 'temporary authority' to a company owned by the wife of Ravi Arora to buy another Bottle-O store in the city, not a liquor license, as previously stated in this story.

Correction: Ravi Arora no longer owns the Bottle-O Mt Albert store.