A family-run human trafficking gang went undetected for years as it forced 16 slavery victims to toil at McDonald’s and a factory supplying major supermarkets.
Ernest Drevenak and Veronika Bubencikova, both 46, were found to have started exploiting the men from the Czech Republic in 2015 but were only caught in 2019. Drevenak is said to have run the gang alongside his brother Zdenek.
Their victims—who were homeless, unemployed, or in very low-paid jobs in the Czech Republic—had been brought to the UK with the promise of a better life.
Some were then put to work in Caxton, Cambridgeshire, at a branch of McDonald’s, with the fast food chain now promising it had improved systems to spot ‘potential risks’.
According to a BBC investigation, some people were forced to work at a facility that produced bread for high-street stores.
The corporation disclosed the identities of 16 victims of slavery; nine of them were employed by the McDonald’s franchise and nine by the Pitta Bread company, which had factories located in Tottenham, north London, and Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire.
Two of the people implicated worked for Speciality Flatbread, which is no longer in business, as well as McDonald’s.
They are said to have been paid at least the national minimum wage, only to have almost all of their cash stolen by the criminal enterprise in charge of them.
The victims spent their days living in cramped accommodations, including a leaking shed and an unheated caravan, even as the gang leaders were lavishing their earnings on luxury cars and gold jewellery.
According to the BBC, warning flags were ignored by officials for years, including the fact that the victims’ pay cheques were deposited into accounts with other names.
Payments meant for at least four of the employees, adding up to £215,000, were said to have gone into an account controlled by the slave-trading gang.
Since the people who were transported here from the Czech Republic could not understand English, gang members filled out their job applications and attended interviews as interpreters.
It was discovered that the workers at McDonald’s were putting in anything from 70 to 100 hours a week.
While employed by the baking company, nine victims shared a terraced house in Enfield, north London.
Dame Sara Thornton, the former independent anti-slavery commissioner, told the BBC after reviewing the investigation’s findings: ‘It really concerns me that so many red flags were missed and that maybe the companies didn’t do enough to protect vulnerable workers.
Detective Sergeant Chris Acourt, who led a probe by Cambridgeshire Police, told of there being ‘massive opportunities’ missed to uncover the gang sooner.
He said: ‘Ultimately, we could have been in a situation to end that exploitation much earlier had we been made aware.’
Ernest and Zdenek Drevenak, the brothers who headed the group, were discovered to have taken their victims’ passports while using violence and terror to maintain control over them.
One victim named Pavel, who waived his right to anonymity, told the BBC how he was first approached by the gang while homeless in the Czech Republic in 2016 and tempted by the promise of a well-paid job in Britain.
But he was only given a few pounds a day and had to work 70 hours a week at McDonald’s.
Pavel said, ‘You can’t undo the damage to my mental health—it will always live with me.
‘We were afraid. If we were to escape and go home, [Ernest Drevenak] has a lot of friends in our town—half the town were his mates.’
He added, ‘I do feel partially exploited by McDonald’s because they didn’t act.
‘I thought if I was working for McDonalds, that they would be a little bit more cautious, that they will notice it.’
The British Retail Consortium said: ‘It is important that the retail industry learns from cases like this to continually strengthen due diligence.’
A spokesperson for McDonald’s (UK & Ireland) said in a statement today: ‘The victims in these cases were cruelly exploited by the criminal perpetrators of these shocking offences. McDonald’s commends the bravery the victims showed during the legal proceedings in bringing the criminals to justice.
The UK needs to implement an immigration programme like Australia and they need to do it fast because not only are they being allowed into the UK, but they’re being exploited, and neither is right nor humane. They’re being treated like cattle; all we need is the cattle prod to go with it.
People like these repeatedly get away with it because our judicial system is so flawed and our government has no control over who enters the UK.
Margaret Thatcher said we were being swamped, but the Tory government of the fifties invited in cheap labour immigrants to man the nationalised industries that we British citizens hated. The idea was to send them back once our government was finished with them, but they didn’t use their brain cells and then realised they couldn’t send them back because they had carved a niche into our society and guess what? They multiplied by having children!
It was a bit like the Gremlins, only for them it wasn’t ‘don’t give them water’. In this case, it should have been ‘don’t let them in,’ because humans multiply; it doesn’t matter who they are or what colour or religion they are; we all multiply!
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 