A federal judge has ruled in favor of 140 former employees of Rockville deaf services company Viable Communications, awarding them $1.1 million in back pay and damages in a class-action lawsuit.
The civil judgment against Viable, founder and former CEO John T.C. Yeh and his brother, former Viable vice president Joseph Yeh, was filed this week in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt. It comes as the Yehs await sentencing scheduled for Nov. 30 in a separate criminal case in a Trenton, N.J., federal court.
The Yehs in October pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit mail fraud. They each face up to 20 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
Nicholas Woodfield, an attorney who is representing the former employees, said he will do whatever possible to get his clients their money.
“We will start our efforts to collect the judgment after the time for appeal has run,” he said.
John Pierce, an attorney for Viable, said Thursday that the company “has never disputed the wages owed to its employees.” He said he didn’t foresee an appeal on the substantive part of the order, but he or his partner had not analyzed the order to see if any other portion could be appealed.
“It was never the intention [of Viable] to be put in the position it was in, where it couldn’t meet its payroll,” Pierce said.
Judge Peter J. Messitte awarded the plaintiffs a total of $567,443 in back wages and an equal amount in damages. Plaintiffs for the lawsuit, filed two years ago, include Glenn Lockhart, Viable’s former director of corporate communications, who was awarded almost $12,000. David Bruce was awarded the most, $35,104.
Mary Yeh, John Yeh’s wife, was dismissed from the lawsuit. Stanley Reed, who represented Mary Yeh in the civil case, said that Messitte found that she was not personally liable for the unpaid wages of former Viable employees and contractors.
Joseph Yeh said in court documents filed this year that he was not involved in the hiring or firing of employees and did not control company finances when employed at Viable. His employment was terminated in November 2009, and he had still not been paid himself for four weeks, he said.
“While I have knowledge of Viable Communications’ failure to pay wages to its employees, I have no personal knowledge pertaining to the claims of the individual plaintiffs in this lawsuit, and played no role in Viable Communications’ failure to pay wages, which resulted from factors outside of its control,” Joseph Yeh said.
Messitte granted some parts of Joseph Yeh’s request to be dismissed from the civil case, but still named him a party in the suit.
In November 2009, John and Joseph Yeh were among 26 people nationwide to be charged in an indictment with conspiring to defraud the Federal Communications Commission’s Video Relay Service program, which helps deaf people communicate, by billing the government for millions of dollars in illegitimate calls.
Story by Gazette.net – kshay@gazette.net
