A federal judge sentenced the owner of an Asian food market on Maui to a six-month jail term Monday for taking from her employees back-overtime money owed to them and for lying to the U.S. Department of Labor about it.
Martina B. Santos, 55, owner of Paradise Asian Foods Inc., which does business in Kahului as Paradise Supermart, has until April 28 to turn herself in to begin serving her sentence.
In addition to the jail term, U.S. District Judge J. Michael Seabright fined Santos $10,000 and ordered her to repay her employees the $21,526 she took from them.
The individual amounts owed to the six employees range from $600 to $6,675.
Santos pleaded guilty in October to obstructing the Labor Department’s enforcement of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
When the Labor Department investigated the business in 2011, Santos admitted that she did not report the overtime her employees worked. She said she paid them for extra work hours at their regular rate rather than at a rate of at least time and a half, and that she did so in off-the-books cash payments. She also agreed to pay her employees the money she owed them.
Santos admitted that she issued company checks to the employees for the back pay and had them sign receipts for the money, which she submitted to the Labor Department as proof of compliance. She then had the employees sign the checks over to her.
All of this was going on while the Internal Revenue Service was investigating Santos and her husband for tax violations.
Roger Santos, 55, Paradise co-owner, pleaded guilty in May 2013 to tax evasion and structuring cash bank deposits to evade reporting requirements.
He admitted that he diverted nearly $2.9 million from the business’s checking account in 2008 and 2009 into other bank accounts to conceal how profitable Paradise really was. Santos then underreported his and his wife’s incomes.
Roger Santos admitted that for 2008 he declared on his joint income tax return that their income was $75,080 when their actual income was $365,267.
U.S. District Judge Leslie E. Kobayashi sentenced Santos in November 2013 to a year in jail, fined him $10,000 and ordered him to pay the IRS $317,559 in back taxes.
With time off for good behavior, Santos completed his jail term in November.
