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PAKISTAN

Factory fire firm offers less than €1,500 a death

German discount clothing firm Kik, which was the main contractor at a Pakistani factory where more than 259 people died in a fire last month, has set up a fund for the victims – offering less than €1,500 per dead worker.

Factory fire firm offers less than €1,500 a death
Kik manager Michael Arretz. Photo: DPA

The firm only admitted having a connection with the disaster after non-governmental organisations revealed it was an important contractor for Ali Enterprises, which ran the factory.

Kik stocked its shops on high streets across Germany with €15.99-a-pair jeans made at the Karachi factory, where around 1,500 people worked across three storeys with just four exits and a serious lack of basic safety measures.

It burned to the ground in early September, killing more than 259 workers who were trapped inside and leaving their families destitute.

After Kik was named as a potential customer, it emerged that the company was actually the major contractor of Ali Enterprises, Der Spiegel reported on Tuesday.

Kik has admitted issuing 75 percent of the firm’s contracts, while workers at Ali Enterprises say “at least 90 percent” of their work was for the German discounter, the magazine said.

And although Kik has put $500,000 into a compensation fund for the families of those who died, this has attracted condemnation from Pakistani trades unions – it works out to $1,930 or less then €1,500, for each person who died.

“That is damn little,” said Nasir Mansoor from the Pakistani association of trades unions NTUF. “And we also don’t know when and via whom the payments will be made.”

He said if the money on offer is not increased, relatives and survivors would sue Kik.

Kik manager Michael Arretz has been trying to improve the firm’s image over the last couple of years, Der Spiegel said.

He has made assurances that the compensation fund would go to families, particularly those affected who had not been given any support by the Pakistani government, which has promised around €5,500 to those who lost relatives.

Many families have complained they have received nothing, while those who have been given cheques say they either bounce – or that they do not have bank accounts in which to cash them.

There remains confusion about how many people actually died in the fire – with 63 still registered as missing, trades unions say more than 300 died. Twenty-nine bodies remain unidentified.

Arretz told Der Spiegel he had had difficulty organising the payments as the company did not have a suitable agent on the ground, but that there was now someone in place.

The unions in Karachi say Kik knew about the terrible safety standards at the factory, including blocked escape routes and sealed windows. Many of the people working there had no contracts, making it difficult for those who were hurt in the fire – and those whose relatives perished – to prove they were there.

The Local/hc

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OPINION: The new luxury Samaritaine store is an example of the ‘Disneyfication’ of Paris

Here is a parable of modern Paris - the parable of La Samaritaine - another piece of authentic Paris grittiness reinvented as a luxury attraction for foreign tourists, writes John Lichfield.

OPINION: The new luxury Samaritaine store is an example of the 'Disneyfication' of Paris
President Emmanuel Macron at the reopening of La Samaritaine. Photo: Christophe Archambault/AFP

Until 2005, La Samaritaine was the most popular and least fashionable department store in Paris, a Gallic version of Grace Brothers from “Are You Being Served”.

The store’s jumble of five linked buildings between the Rue de Rivoli and the river Seine was one of the few remaining islands of unselfconscious, authentic, non-tourist grittiness in central Paris.  You could find everything in La Samaritaine from underpants to diamond tiaras; from puppies to concrete-mixers; from ready-made curtains to piranha fish.

IN PICTURES See inside the revamped Samaritaine store

Entering La Samaritaine was like playing a game of three dimensional  snakes and ladders. Each floor had six or seven different levels, joined by slopes of worn linoleum or by short flights of steps. To get from curtains to electrical goods, supposedly on the same floor, you climbed a few stairs into showers and bathrooms, turned right and went down again.

After 16 years of dereliction and legal wrangles, La Samaritaine re-opened again this week – as a supermarket for luxury brands, a five-star hotel and a gourmet roof restaurant with an unrivalled view onto the river and the Île de Cité. It will have private viewing rooms for the super-rich. It will have cafés, where you can eat top of the range burgers and caviar-on-baguette.

The staff of the old Samaritaine were the least helpful in Paris and consequently the world. The new staff will wear chinos and sneakers – and a smile.

The slogan of the old store was “The whole of Paris comes to La Samaritaine.”. The new store is aimed at the richer citizens of Yokohama or Shanghai.

The destruction of the old Samaritaine was romantically, historically and socially a calamity. It was also, I suppose, inevitable.

The modern world, and modern retailing methods, passed La Samaritaine by on the other side. People no longer wanted to go to a shop in central Paris to buy a concrete mixer or lawn-mower or even a pet piranha fish. Samaritaine still had 12 models of lawn-mowers when it was closed overnight, allegedly for safety reason, in 2005.

The world’s biggest luxury goods conglomerate, Louis-Vuitton-Moet-Hennessy (LVMH) – has spent €700 million on re-building and re-imagining La Samaritaine, ripping out the sloping floors and worn lino but preserving its 1907 art nouveau metal stair-cases and galleries.

A spectacular, pale-yellow fresco of peacocks which surrounds the main atrium was all but lost in the old clutter. It has been wonderfully restored.

No doubt the new Samaritaine will be a great success – once the foreign tourists come in great numbers to France again. The new hotel, Le Cheval Blanc, will be the only “palais”, or five-star hotel, in Paris to have rooms and suites with views onto the river Seine.

All the same, the transformation is cruelly emblematic of what has happened to central Paris in the last two or three decades. There is a campaign going on at present against the alleged saccage (destruction) of the French capital by bicycle-lanes,  ugly street furniture and graffiti and poorly maintained gardens. I have sympathy with some, but not all, of the complaints.

What I regret far more – without knowing how it could have been prevented – is the fact that the inner arrondissements of Paris have lost so much of their quirkiness and eccentricity in recent decades.

The international travel boom (pre-Covid) has turned central Paris into a self-conscious, though still beautiful, “Parisland”, a tourist theme-park to match Disneyland 40 kilometres to the east. Even relatively well-off families are being pushed out by high rents and property prices.

The re-opening of La Samaritaine, delayed for a year by the Covid pandemic, is one of a flurry of restorations and recreations of land-mark buildings in central Paris this summer.

The Musée Carnavalet, which traces the history of the city, has been cleverly re-thought and re-designed. The Bourse du Commerce, a spectacular circular building near Les Halles which was moribund for decades, has been resurrected as an art museum and exhibition space by the billionaire art-collector and entrepreneur (Gucci and FNAC) François Pinault.

The Hotel de la Marine, one half of the imposing 18th century terrace which stands on the north side of the Place de la Concorde, has been beautifully restored as a series of restaurants and exhibition spaces.

All of these buildings are within 15 minutes walk of one another – and all are a short stroll from the Louvre and the Palais Royal and Notre Dame. They are, in their revived form, great and welcome adornments to the capital which will be appreciated by Parisians and visitors alike.

Except for La Samaritaine.

I cannot see the new version of this once great institution as anything but a theft – a loss, a diminution of what once made central Paris not just beautiful but idiosyncratic and unmistakably itself. 

And, in any case, where in earth does one now go in Paris if you suddenly need to buy a pneumatic drill?

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