A UK farm worker, believed to have been the victim of exploitation, has been found by police, five years after he was thought to have been murdered, the Evening Standard reports.
At the time of his disappearance Ricardas Puisys was working at Nightlayer Leek Company in Dean Drove, Chatteris, through an agency.
Police said there were genuine concerns Ricardas came to harm the evening he disappeared in September, 2015. They now believed Ricardas made the decision to run away as he had been a victim of crime, having previously been exploited.
The farm had been the subject of previous news articles saying in 2013, following a BBC documentary about worker exploitation, that it would no longer hire labour through agencies. It was also named in a Guardian investigation in 2016 that referred to a gangmaster in the Fens, an Englishman called Martyn Slender, supplying at the time to Asda’s leek producer, Nightlayer Leeks. According to the Guardian article, “Slender fiddled their timesheets so that it looked as though they were being paid the legal minimum wage per hour, when in fact he was defrauding them of half of it.”
