(MENAFN- AFP) Tashkent Ibragimov initially jumped at the chance to work on Sochi's Olympic construction, hoping the earnings would help his family in Uzbekistan. Instead, the job left him broke and humiliated.Having already worked in Russia's far eastern Vladivostok constructing hotels for last year's high-profile Asia-Pacific Economic Summit, Ibragimov "thought it would be good in Sochi as well".But the 31-year-old said he was cheated out of his salary by a subcontractor building a hotel for some of the 300,000 sports fans expected to descend on the Black Sea resort city for the 2014 Winter Olympic Games."We didn't send money home for six months," the father-of-three told AFP in broken Russian, explaining how his boss would only give out sporadic cash allowances to him and his group of 15 workers instead of paying a monthly salary as agreed.On top of feeling powerless and frustrated at having to continuously fight for his paycheck, Ibragimov, as foreman of his group, was under added pressure from his co-workers.Relatives of co-workers from the same impoverished area as Ibragimov blamed him when their cash transfers didn't arrive and went so far as to harass his family about it back home in the western Uzbekistan town of Beruni, he said."My grandfather couldn't take the stress, he died of a heart attack because of this," Ibragimov said bitterly.His story is just one example of what rights group say is a system of unjust treatment of migrants by the firms working on Sochi's sites.Earlier this month, international rights group Human Rights Watch published a report highlighting the "exploitation" at Sochi, contrasting the abusive treatment of migrant labourers with the "big hopes and dreams" for Russia's athletes at the Games.Titled "Race to the Bottom" and based on dozens of interviews with workers, it calls on Russian authorities and the International Olympic Committee to address rights violations such as wage arrears, the confiscation of identification documents and inadequate rest periods between long shifts.Russian authorities have rejected the accusations, while the main agency overseeing construction, Olympstroi, said it had conducted more than 1,300 checks for violations and received only five complaints from workers via the hotline numbers made available on various posters in the city.But the workers are mostly from Central Asia, with a limited knowledge of Russian, and are often wary of complaining out of fear of deportation, said Semyon Simonov, who runs a consultation centre for migrants in Sochi for watchdog Memorial.The authorities are concealing "massive human rights violations on the Olympic venue sites," he said."Clearly everything leads to the very top... they know everything in Olympstroi and in (Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry) Kozak's department, but they choose to ignore the problems due to the worker shortage."With preparations running behind schedule, more than 22,000 additional workers will be needed to finish the construction work on time, a government report said this month, according to Kommersant business daily.Finding out who is responsible for unpaid wages is not straightforward and requires wading through a complex web of subcontractors, said Memorial lawyer Alexander Popkov, who works with Simonov.The chain of subcontractors also means that the enormous sum invested in Olympic development -- over $50 billion -- mostly goes to middle-men."This huge stack of money melts away to pennies on its way to the worker," Popkov said.Large contractors often deny violations which are committed by the smaller firms carrying out the actual construction, he told AFP.Most labourers don't even have copies of their contract, according to Simonov, who puts the number of migrant workers in Sochi at over 40,000, much higher than the official figure of 15,700."Many people leave (Sochi) with no money," he said. Unemployed and broke, some migrants end up in dire circumstances that push them towards crime, which in turn fuels nationalist sentiment among locals.Over the past two years, swastikas and SS signs have become widespread in a city that has always been a melting pot of many Caucasus ethnic groups, Simonov said.In January, investigators charged two Sochi teenagers with inciting hatred for attacking migrant workers from Central Asia and spreading "nationalist rumours".Scarred by his experience, Ibragimov said he has stopped working on Olympic venues -- but he isn't ready yet to leave Sochi, where he has just found employment with a non-Olympic contractor."There is a lot of work here," he said. "I was just tired of the humiliation."
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