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Olympic Painting & Roofing, which was in the news in December for painting Mitt Romney's Belmont mansion despite an
ongoing state investigation into its hiring practices, pleaded guilty to a charge of failure to obtain a Worker's
Compensation insurance policy. The company was fined $1,000 and is banned for three years from obtaining public works
contracts.
In addition, the company agreed to pay more than $48,700 in restitution to the 69 employees and nearly $10,300 in fines
for misclassifying workers as independent contractors and failing to pay overtime.
"It's long overdue," said Marc Erlich, executive secretary-treasurer of the New England Regional Council of Carpenters,
which has contended that violations such as Olympic's are pervasive in the area's construction industry. "This company
is known in the industry to have been a bad actor for many years."
Olympic's president, George Vasiliades of Ipswich, appeared in Peabody District Court yesterday with his lawyer, William
Cintolo, for the plea. He said he was pleased that the case was closed.
"We're glad that it's over and we can put it behind us now," Vasiliades said. "It was a fair resolution."
Vasiliades had earlier denied the allegations.
After he pleaded guilty yesterday, Vasiliades pointed out that the state penalties could have been worse. He was facing
up to a year in jail or a fine of $1,500 or both.
The attorney general's office had been investigating Olympic since October 2005 after the carpenters' union asserted
that Olympic was misclassifying workers as independent contractors to avoid paying taxes, overtime, and other obligations.
A state audit of the company's payroll records showed that Vasiliades' company had failed to pay 69 employees $48,500 in
overtime in 2006. Also, for most of 2005, investigators said, Vasiliades misclassified numerous employees as independent
contractors and failed to obtain a Workers' Compensation insurance policy, which would have covered employees who were
injured on the job and had to miss work.
The company owed one employee almost $300 in April 2006.
Coakley vowed yesterday to continue cracking down on companies that fail to obey state labor laws, but said her office
depends on workers and others to report violations.
"Trying to make these cases and investigate them is a little bit difficult," Coakley said in a telephone interview
yesterday afternoon. "I think we've made good inroads in sending the message out to employers and to workers that we
will be aggressive in investigating these complaints if we believe that the law's been broken."
Union leaders and a worker had also asserted that the company had hired illegal immigrants, but that was beyond the
scope of the state's investigation, Coakley said. The state doesn't have jurisdiction over federal immigration laws.
Olympic painted Romney's salmon-colored mansion two years after a Page 1 article in the Globe outlined the allegations
against the company.
Yesterday wasn't the first time Vasiliades had run into trouble with hiring practices. In 1998, he pleaded guilty to
Workers' Compensation fraud charges, failing to pay unemployment tax contributions, and other violations, according to
the attorney general's office. He was sentenced to a year's probation and ordered to pay a $250 fine, court costs, and
$4,880 in restitution to three workers.
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A Peabody painting and roofing company pleaded guilty yesterday to violating state labor law and agreed to pay 69
workers thousands of dollars in back wages as part of a settlement reached with Attorney General Martha Coakley.