<\/p>\n
Britain\u2019s insolvency service has started formal criminal and civil investigations into P&O Ferries to look into the company\u2019s decision to fire hundreds of workers without notice last month, business minister Kwasi Kwarteng said on Friday.<\/p>\n
The probe comes after P&O Ferries admitted to breaking the law in the manner in which it terminated about 800 staff last month to hire cheaper agency workers, a move that has since caused major backlash from politicians and workers.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can confirm that the Insolvency Service has initiated both formal criminal and civil investigations into the circumstances surrounding the recent redundancies made by P&O Ferries,\u201d Dean Beale, who heads the insolvency service, said in a letter to Kwarteng.<\/p>\n
P&O Ferries, which is owned by Dubai-based logistics group DP World, did not immediately respond to Reuters request for a comment on Friday.<\/p>\n
The Insolvency Service is a government agency whose remit includes tackling misconduct and \u201csharp practice\u201d by company directors.<\/p>\n
Transport minister Grant Shapps said earlier this week he had asked the agency to consider disqualifying CEO Peter Hebblethwaite, describing his behavior as \u201coutrageous\u201d.<\/p>\n
Earlier in the week P&O Ferries rejected a request from the government to rehire the employees it had fired, saying that doing so would cause the company to collapse.<\/p>\n
Shapps, whose officials have detained two of P&O operated ferries citing safety concerns since the job cuts, has also said a package of measures would be introduced to block ferry groups seeking to pay workers less than the minimum wage.<\/p>\n
(Reuters – Reporting by Muvija M; editing by William James)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n maritime professional<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Britain\u2019s insolvency service has started formal criminal and civil investigations into P&O Ferries to look into the company\u2019s decision to fire hundreds of workers without notice last month, business minister Kwasi Kwarteng said on Friday. The probe comes after P&O Ferries admitted to breaking the law in the manner in which it terminated about 800 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29748,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-maritime-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29747\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/29748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}