Eatery hit hard on job rip-offs

GOLD Coast restaurant owner has been slugged more than $320,000 for underpaying staff at two Surfers Paradise Japanese eateries.

Shigeo Ishiyama, owner and operator of Samurais Paradise and former operator of the Japanese Curry House Kawaii, copped the largest penalty in Queensland of its kind this year, according to the Fair Work Ombudsman.

Mr Ishiyama was penalised $38,000, while his company Samurais Paradise Pty Ltd was hit with a further $284,000.

The Federal Circuit Court in Brisbane found Mr Ishiyama underpaid nine employees a total of $59,080 over a period of just four months in 2015. The judge slammed his conduct as “aggravating” and “heinous”.

Most workers were Japanese citizens aged in their 20s who were in Australia on 417 working holiday visas. They worked by cooking and waiting tables.

Fair Work inspectors first found underpayment when they asked Mr Ishiyama to provide pay records in 2015 during an auditing blitz of restaurants and fast food shops across the city.

Inspectors then educated Mr Ishiyama on his legal obli- gations and his company made back-payments to workers. But when inspectors followed up they found the company had twice provided false records.

Inspectors found employees had been paid flat rates between $8-11 an hour – about half the award rate – and created false records to hide the underpayments. In his ruling Judge Salvatore Vasta described the exploitation of the workers as “certainly deliberate” and imposed near-maximum penalties.

“The aggravating circumstances of the falsifying of records and the provision on two occasions of false records, shows that this case is in a very serious bracket,” Judge Vasta said. He said the scale of underpayments totalled almost $60,000 in just four months, which could have been $180,000 over a year.

“When one is looking at a small business, the temptation is great that such a saving to them would give them a competitive edge of all the other businesses in their area,” Judge Vasta said.

The Fair Work Ombudsman said Mr Ishiyama’s company had back-paid the workers’ wages in full.

Judge Vasta has also ordered the company to backpay the employees more than $8000 in outstanding superannuation.