...

“They work constantly,” said a manager of the lavish tower project, which employs about 50 North Koreans. “I have even built a room for them so they can rest without having to go back to their labour camp.”

The workers themselves are less forthcoming. They are highly suspicious and reluctant to talk. When one labourer was asked how long he had been working on the site that day, he said: “You don’t need to know and you shouldn’t know.”

Despite the many hours they spend on the site, the North Koreans building the tower, and thousands more working on other sites across Qatar, may receive as little as 10% of their salary during the three-years they typically work in Qatar.

Instead, their earnings are expropriated by a chain of North Korean state-run bodies, overseen by Office 39, a department that reportedly controls a fund to bankroll Kim Jong-un’s lifestyle...