Three restaurant owners who financially abused their immigrant employees were handed jail terms this week by a Calgary judge.
The offenders — Manikandan Kasinathan, Chandramohan Marjak and Mary Roche — were each sentenced to 90-day jail terms, to be served on weekends, after they were convicted of fraud over $5,000.
Kasinathan, Marjak and Roche, who co-owned Marina Dosa and Tandoori Grill in Calgary, will also be placed on 18-months probation and must pay back the $44,000 they stole from three employees.
The sentences follow a piecemeal trial that began in the summer of 2024 and wrapped up in May 2025 with the conviction decision by Justice Sandra Mah.
Must be nice to be important enough to have your jail time only on weekends. Heaven forbid the punishment for theft, abuse, fraud and modern slavery interfere with the majority of your week.
Probably because jailing them completely means their business closes and puts the rest of their employees out of work.
I don’t love it but i understand it. The best way to punish these people isn’t to jail them but to make them as poor as the people they mistreated.
The court should be imposing penalties severe enough not just to repay what they stole but to enrich their victims. Not just $44,000 but everything over the absolute minimum for basic food and lodging for a year or two.
Why should these people be allowed to have employees again? Especially concurrent with their sentences? The message the court appears to be sending here is “abuse your employees, and the the law says you should break even”.
The actual problem here is that the feds are complicit…they incentivize extracting financial gain from TFW.
