A former employee is suing a now-closed Boston retail dispensary, claiming wage theft, NBC Boston reports. In the lawsuit, the former employee for Pure Oasis, Boston’s first adult-use dispensary, alleges that she was not paid her last paycheck or compensated for accrued vacation time.
In an email to the employee included in court filings outlined by NBC Boston, Pure Oasis said they “understand that under Massachusetts law, all final wages including accrued vacation are due at separation” but that the company’s accounts are frozen and they “do not have immediate access to funds to process payroll.”
Pure Oasis closed abruptly earlier this month after the state froze the company’s bank account because of unpaid back taxes, WGBH reports. Pure Oasis reportedly owes more than $300,000 in back taxes and had been approved for a $300,000 grant from the state’s Cannabis Social Equity Trust Fund, which Kobie Owens, the company’s co-founder, indicated would be applied to the tax bill. The funds had not been disbursed by the time the state seized the account.
“We can’t pay people, we can’t order product, we can’t operate, which means we can’t pay the balance. That kind of bureaucratic insanity was the tipping point for everything.” — Evans to WGBH
Evans told WGBH that the company “didn’t want to be in a situation where we had people working and their payment was in limbo down the road.”
Aside from the taxes owed, the company is also paying a $65,000 debt to a cannabis supplier from a past lawsuit and is facing another $175,000 lawsuit from a construction company over work done on a third store. In the EGBH report, Evans acknowledges that Pure Oasis has 60 staff members who have not been paid.
