MOSCOW, January 27 (RAPSI) – A Vietnamese national has been detained and charged on suspicion of using slave labor in Moscow has been officialy charged, the Interior Ministry’s Main Department for Moscow announced on Monday.

In September 2013, a Russian national and former head of a Moscow-based company was charged with holding approximately 700 illegal workers from Vietnam prisoner. A second person involved in the crime, a Vietnamese national, was detained on January 15.

“The detained Vietnamese national, together with other individuals, organized the illegal residence of foreign workers at the Izmailovo health and fitness center on Sovetskaya Street, which their criminal group controlled,” the statement reads.

According to the investigators, the criminal group purchased sewing equipment, established working and living premises with conditions that do not correspond to sanitary and labor safety rules, and brought over 700 foreigners who do not speak Russian into the country. They confiscated their documents, thereby preventing them from leaving the job and returning to their home country.

Russia has the world’s largest number of illegal migrants, accounting for almost seven percent of the country’s working population, according to an International Migration Outlook report issued last year by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Accoring to a report released in 2013 by Australia-based Walk Free Foundation, Russia is among the world’s top 10 countries by absolute number of people held in slavery. Walk Free ranked Russia only 49th of 162 countries by prevalence of slavery because slaves account for only a small percentage of the Russian population.

Russia has an estimated 516,000 slaves in a population that the study put at 143 million, most of them migrants doing forced labor in agriculture and the construction industry, the report said.