Melbourne; 06 July 2021 (UMMN): An Indian couple in Melbourne face a maximum of 25 years in jail for keeping a slave at their home for eight years when sentencing takes place in the Supreme Court on 21 July 2021.
The couple Kumuthini Kannan, 53, and her husband, Kandasamy Kannan, 57, were found guilty in a recent pre-sentencing hearing, for two counts of possessing a slave and exercising power over a slave.
Mrs. Kumuthini Kannan is a former Secretary of the Hindu Society of Victoria (HSV).
According to The Age, authorities only uncovered the offence when the woman, then in her 50s, was found by ambulance paramedics lying in a pool of her own urine on July 30, 2015, weighing 40 kilograms and suffering from a urinary infection and undiagnosed diabetes.
Couple recruited the woman from India in 2007 on an agreement that she would work for Kannans, but was denied proper wages and other rights and paid the equivalent of $3.39 a day. When her travel visa expired after a month, the couple kept the woman instead of alerting authorities that she had overstayed her visa.
The woman, who cannot be identified, claimed Mrs Kannan physically and verbally abused her, including pouring boiling liquids on her, throwing hot tea in her face, hitting her with a frozen chicken and pushing her down stairs. She was denied her freedom to leave or to communicate with her family in India.
