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Investigatesunlawful agency feesA FINE GAEL councillor who recently served as the Mayor of South Dublin is one of the owners of and a shareholder in a recruitment company that has charged foreign nurses thousands of euro in “agency fees” to come and work in Irish nursing homes.
Baby Pereppadan, a longtime Fine Gael member and a local representative for Tallaght South, co-founded a limited company called Angel Care Consultancy Limited in 2022 with businessman Babu Valooran Kochuvarkey.
The Journal Investigates has spoken to three nurses who say they paid thousands of euro in agency fees to Angel Care Consultancy Limited, on top of and separate to the money they paid for the standard expenses nurses face when coming to Ireland, including the fee associated with their visa, a work permit, the Royal College of Surgeons Ireland (RCSI) aptitude exam, the English language proficiency exam, and their plane tickets.
Pereppadan has said he was ‘totally unaware’ that any such fee was being charged through his company.
Part of a recruitment fee requested of one of the nurses we spoke with was transferred to the bank account of Baby’s son, Britto Pereppadan, who is also a Fine Gael councillor.
It is unlawful for an employment agency to require an applicant to pay an agency fee in respect of employment under legislation introduced in Ireland in 2012.
The Protection of Employees (Temporary Agency Work) Act 2012 states that an employment agency shall not charge “an individual fee in respect of the making of any arrangement for the purpose of that individual’s being employed”. It states that anyone who does so will be guilty of an offence and shall be liable, on summary conviction, to a class A fine.
The 2012 act is derived from the EU Temporary Agency Workers Directive 2008 which says that agencies “shall not charge workers any fees in exchange for arranging for them to be recruited by a user undertaking, or for concluding a contract or an employment relationship”.
In response to a series of questions from The Journal Investigates, Baby Pereppadan has claimed that he did not know anything about agency fees being charged to the three nurses.
“I have no knowledge of the allegations regarding agency fees being charged to nurses, and I am shocked to learn of these claims, should they be true. I have had no involvement in the day-to-day activities of the company, nor was I made aware of any extra fees being levied,” Baby Pereppadan said in an initial response to The Journal Investigates.
He also claimed that he was given a 50% ownership stake in the company as a gesture of goodwill from Valooran, the other co-founder.
When The Journal Investigates told Pereppadan that it has evidence that he had represented Angel Care in a business deal with an employer in the last year, he did not reply on this point.
He said he has not been involved in financial transactions with nurses in India on behalf of Angel Care.
Businessman Babu Valooran Kochuvarkey told The Journal Investigates that all of the money he charged to nurses was for application-related expenses such as examination fees, work permits and visa payments, as well as accommodation and transport in Dublin while the nurses went through the RCSI examination process for ten days.
He said that the nurses agreed to the charges that they paid.
“All payments were made with full transparency and via communication,” he said.
“Additionally, I would like to confirm that we did not charge any service fees to the nursing home for recruiting these candidates.”
The three nurses paid an Indian host family hundreds of euros each for staying in their home during that ten day period, as well as for a sim card and transportation. The Journal Investigates has seen documentation showing the breakdown of what they paid for each of these expenses.
This was put to Valooran, and he did not reply on this point.
The nurses also provided a breakdown of the money they paid for their examination fees and visa fees separately.
Valooran said that he will further engage with one nurse on her request for a refund.
All three of the nurses dealt with Valooran over the phone during the recruitment process as a representative for Angel Care, and paid bank transfers or gave over cash on his instructions.
One of the nurses paid a sum equivalent to just over €3,000 to the account of Britto Pereppadan, Baby’s son, who is a Fine Gael councillor in the Tallaght Central local electoral area.
The Journal Investigates has seen the bank slip for this transaction, messages that show that Britto’s bank account details were supplied by Valooran, and a bank statement from the nurse in question that tallies with the amounts she was ordered to transfer.
Britto Pereppadan has claimed to The Journal Investigates that Valooran owed him money for a personal debt and has made reference to a separate transfer that Valooran made to him, stating that he did not know how that money was obtained.
Britto has no formal connection to the company.
Baby Pereppadan is an owner of and a shareholder in Angel Care, but he resigned as a director in 2023, on the same day that his daughter, a 22-year-old dentistry graduate, was registered as a director.
Baby Pereppadan has said that the appointment of his daughter as a director was “nominal” and “administrative”, and that she has no involvement in the company beyond her name being used in this capacity.
Baby has been elected three times in Tallaght South, having first run unsuccessfully in 2009.
Eventually he won a seat following a campaign with the slogan ‘no one puts Baby in the corner’.
His son was elected for the first time in the most recent local elections, and he is also a working doctor in Tallaght University Hospital.
The nurse who transferred money to an Indian account under Britto’s name told The Journal Investigates that she insisted on paying the agency fee through the bank, though Valooran had initially asked her to pay cash.
Ananya (not her real name) claims that Valooran told her that Britto was a cousin of his who lives in Kerala. He also asked her to transfer the equivalent of €597 in rupees to a bank account under his own name.
Ananya told The Journal Investigates that once she got to Ireland she became aware that charging these fees is not allowed under Irish employment law. She has made a complaint to authorities in India, who have referred the matter to the State Chief of Police in the region.
The other two nurses, Sabeena and Jincy (not their real names), say they paid the agency fees in cash directly to a man in Kerala under Valooran’s instructions via WhatsApp.
A complaint about the agency has also been made to gardaí.
The Journal Investigates understands through its investigations that Baby Pereppadan is also supporting another agency with its recruitment of nurses from India to Ireland.
This has involved attending at least one meeting with a prospective client in Dublin during which he said he had worked with an agent from the agency for four years.
At a meeting with the potential client in July, Pereppadan said his political connections would help him to push through work permits for prospective employees in order to speed up the recruitment process. He also claimed to be very close with Tánaiste and Fine Gael leader Simon Harris.
He also said that Angel Care had experienced some ‘trouble’ without elaborating on what this was.
Ananya paid €2,800 in an aptitude test fee, €226.30 for her atypical work visa, €118.55 in a VFS fee (which is a standard charge in India that nurses pay when they are going to work abroad) and then approximately €3,589 in an agency fee to Angel Care to come here – €3,000 of which was paid into the account of a Britto Pereppadan in India.
The rest of the charges she paid outside of the agency fee are standard and legitimate; coming to work in Ireland as a nurse, doctor, or care assistant is an expensive process that thousands of migrant healthcare workers choose to finance every year, believing that living and working in Ireland is a good opportunity.
Ananya told The Journal Investigates:
I took out a debt on my home to pay for all of this. My family was not financially stable at the time, but we found the money.
The three nurses The Journal Investigates spoke to, who were brought here to work in a nursing home by Angel Care, made the collective decision more than two months ago to resign from their posts over working conditions.
Ananya says that she reached out to Valooran for help after she resigned alongside the other two nurses.
In the days after our resignation, he was supportive and said ‘don’t worry, we will find you another job,’ but he never called or messaged again after a certain point, and never came back to me with an update on any potential jobs for me.
“Through the support of the organisation Migrant Nurses Ireland, and the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO), I have now after two months found new employment,” she said.
Another nurse, Sabeena, said that following her experience in the nursing home and her resignation, she asked Valooran to refund her the agency fee.
“At first, he said ‘Yes, I will give it back’ but after that, no message, and no response, and I did not get the money back,” the nurse claimed.
Valooran told The Journal Investigates that he tried to support these nurses but he was not in a position “to secure alternate placements immediately”.
He said that he has always operated in good faith to assist candidates, and that he is committed to “resolving any misunderstandings”.
Sabeena further claimed that Valooran has not reached out to see how the nurses are coping without work in the last two months.
“It is actually difficult to survive here. It is hard to find and pay for accommodation without any work. The agency hasn’t asked if we are OK, do we need any help, nothing,” she said.
This nurse claims that in February of this year she paid an agency fee of ₹304500 to Valooran’s “cousin” in cash in Kerala, which is equivalent roughly to €3,020.
She said that because her English language qualification was set to expire, and she needed to get a job offer letter before that happened, she did not mind paying the fee.
Valooran told The Journal Investigates: “The payment made to Mr Britto [Pereppadan] was a personal borrowing to assist with expenses and not a business-related transaction. I transferred the payment received from the candidate in India to cover my debt. The candidate was fully aware of this arrangement.”
Both Ananya and Sabeena said they paid for their own flights, and these were not covered by the agency fee.
A third nurse, Jincy, paid ₹309,500 (equivalent to €3,068.70) in an agency fee through cash in India.
It’s understood that Valooran relayed the costs that Jincy had to pay over the phone, and she then sent him a message confirming the amounts including the agency fee. After the money was handed over in cash, Valooran sent a message to her to say “received”.
“I feel very sad that I spent so much money to come here and I have struggled so much since,” she told The Journal Investigates.
Migrant healthcare workers being charged steep fees to come and work in homes and centres in western countries is a known phenomenon, and in the UK there have been multiple investigations into the matter, including by the BBC and the Observer, as well as statements from unions calling for Government action to stop “exploitation” by employers and intermediaries.
In Ireland the healthcare workforce and the nursing workforce has become increasingly international, and is increasingly dependent specifically on Indian nurses who come here to staff nursing homes, hospitals, and care facilities.
Migrant Nurses Ireland (MNI) an organisation that was founded by nurses who came here years ago to help those who are newly arrived, which is now working closely with the INMO, has publicly decried what they describe as the “increasing prevalence of illegal recruitment practices affecting international nurses”.
MNI says it is aware of many nurses who have been charged “exorbitant” fees to come and work in nursing homes in Ireland, and has said there is a need for increased regulation and protection.
However, there has been little political discourse on the matter in Ireland to date.
Reporter: Eimer McAuley • Investigation Editors: Christine Bohan, Sinead O’Carroll & Susan Daly • Investigation Editor, The Journal Investigates: Conor O’Carroll • Social Media & Video: Cliodhna Travers • Main Image Design: Lorcan O’Reilly
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