Mississauga Employer Jailed for Not Paying Wages
Published June 6, 2017 at 11:14 pm
A Mississauga employer has been jailed and fined after failing to obey an order to pay $140,000 in wages.
The province of Ontario recently announced that the employer, who operated a Brampton business known as Academic Montessori as well as the WISE (Wonderful Interactive Summer Experience) summer camp in Mississauga, failed to pay his workers–many of them university students. He has been convicted following a trial.
The province announced that the conviction of Peter David Sinisa Sesek, imposed in Mississauga court, was for failure to comply with an order to pay that was issued by a Ministry of Labour employment standards officer.
Sesek has been handed a 30 day jail sentence and a fine of $20,000.
The order to pay, issued March 31, 2015, amounts to about $140,000 and is owed to 43 claimants.
Sesek’s businesses are no longer operating.
The sums owed to the 43 claimants date from 2014 and amount to about $127,000. They range from $700 to $12,000. All wages were owing at the time of sentence.
The province pointed out that a person who contravenes the ESA or its regulations–or fails to comply with an order under the act–is guilty of an offence.
A person convicted under the ESA may be fined up to $50,000 or face a prison sentence of up to 12 months (or both). If a corporation is identified in a case, the fine may be as high as $100,000.
For a corporation with a previous conviction, the fine may be up to $250,000 and if there is more than one previous conviction, the fine may be up to $500,000.
The court also imposed a 25-per-cent victim fine surcharge as required by the Provincial Offences Act. The surcharge is credited to a special provincial government fund to assist victims of crime.
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