Simon Nget a.k.a. Chang S. Nget, 45, is a self-made Chinese entrepreneur from Cambodia. Mr. Nget and his wife, Michelle Lu Nget a.k.a. Pei Ying Nget, 51, were accused of over 240 criminal charges based on their business practices at the Saigon Grill restaurants in Manhattan, located at 620 Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side and 91 University Place in Greenwich Village, and formerly located at 1700 Second Avenue on the Upper East Side. The couple has owned and operated the popular restaurants since 1996. Wage theft violations included the following: • Paying delivery workers $2 an hour - well under the minimum wage of $7.15. • Demanding that employees cash their paychecks and then return significant portions of the money to Nget in cash. • Fining employees for failing to put orders into the system computer. • Firing workers who picketed the restaurant for unfair practices
Location
United States · Manhattan, New York · 2008
(location generalized to protect survivors) Response & intervention
The Ngets, who pleaded not guilty, were released on bond and continue to operate their two remaining restaurants, at Amsterdam and 90th Street and on University Place between 12th and 13th Streets, although they no longer deliver from the downtown location. In a separate federal lawsuit brought pro bono by lawyers from Davis, Polk & Wardwell, Magistrate Judge Michael H. Dolinger ruled against the Ngets in October, finding their testimony about their business practices “incredible” and “manifestly false” and ordering them to pay $4.6 million in back pay and damages to 36 delivery workers, many of whom were illegal immigrants from China. One delivery worker was awarded over $300,000.
Mr. and Mrs. Nget were arrested on 242 state criminal charges each of cheating the food deliverers for their restaurants out of millions of dollars in minimum wages, falsifying business records, taking kickbacks and defrauding the state’s unemployment insurance system. Each count carries a prison sentence of up to four years.
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