CHECKING: Lai (right, front) talking to a lady operator of a massage centre as officers scrutinised the paperwork.
MIRI: The Miri City Council (MCC) hoped the issue of reflexology and massage centres here would not be blown out of proportion.
The Ops Patuh were mounted from Sept 12 over a period of seven days to inspect at least 89 centres offering massage services licensed by the MCC.
“We invited the press and the women’s groups to come along on our operations, but many of them do not bother to turn up, and some of them exaggerated the issue,” Miri Mayor Lawrence Lai said during an afternoon sweep of the city lasting about three hours recently.
The enforcement team comprising about a dozen or more personnel from various departments checked on at least three things — medical reports of the masseuses, approval permit (AP) from the Labour Department, and work permit (WP) from the Immigration Department.
“We do not inform them in advance of our operations — it’s random,” said Lai who stressed the operations’ transparency by inviting the press to tag along as observers.
Lai was surprised to hear of an allegation about the occurrence of HIV infections in the city’s massage centres.
“We’re probably the first and only city council to require massage centres to produce medical reports for their masseurs and masseuses,” he said, stressing on the extra measures taken by MCC to counter rumours of HIV infections in massage centres.
However, Lai did not allow members of the opposition parties to follow the team on their operations because he did not want the issue to be politicised.
He hoped that the concerned parties would not simply play up the issue of massage centres without seeing for themselves the actually situation at these places.
The issuing of license for massage centres in Miri was frozen last year, and out of the 80 massage centres inspected, one was found to be unlicensed.
They did not include the 10 license holders who faced staffing problems and could not open shop due to their failure to obtain the necessary APs and WPs for foreign workers to be hired.
Of the 298 registered foreign workers on record, only 269 were found to be still working.
One centre was found to have only one foreign worker from China, another centre was closed because all their foreign workers have not returned from their home country, while the others have about three to four staff members.
The workers were either locals, or from China, Indonesia, Thailand, or Philippines.