U.S. District Court for the NMI Chief Judge Ramona V. Manglona has denied as moot a motion to dismiss the original lawsuit filed by seven Chinese construction workers against a contractor of the Imperial Pacific International (CNMI) LLC over the injuries they allegedly suffered during accidents at IPI\u2019s casino-resort project in Garapan. <\/p>\n
Manglona dismissed yesterday Gold Mantis Construction Decoration (CNMI) LLC\u2019s motion to dismiss the original lawsuit because the workers have already filed an amended complaint.<\/p>\n
Manglona vacated the motion hearing set for April 4, 2019.<\/p>\n
In the original complaint filed last December, the seven workers, through counsel Bruce Berline, sued Gold Mantis for negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress.<\/p>\n
Gold Mantis moved to dismiss the lawsuit for lack of jurisdiction.<\/p>\n
However, last Feb. 11, the plaintiffs and Gold Mantis submitted an agreement that allows the workers to amend their complaint.<\/p>\n
The seven workers filed the amended complaint last Friday. <\/p>\n
In dismissing the motion to dismiss as moot, citing precedent by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Manglona said: \u201cIt is well established in our circuit that an amended complaint supersedes the original, the latter being treated thereafter as non-existent.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the amended lawsuit, the plaintiffs are still suing Gold Mantis, but added IPI and another contractor, MCC International Saipan Ltd. Co., as defendants.<\/p>\n
In the amended lawsuit, the seven workers are suing the defendants for alleged forced labor in violation of the Trafficking Victims Protection Re-authorization Act, forced labor in violation of the CNMI Anti-Trafficking Act, negligence, and liability for employees of subcontractor.<\/p>\n
The workers alleged, among other things, that they were forced to work long hours for below minimum wage under extremely dangerous conditions at the casino-resort worksite. <\/p>\n
The plaintiffs asked the court to hold the defendants liable to pay them damages, attorney\u2019s fees, and court costs.<\/p>\n
IPI previously denied the allegations.<\/p>\n
The seven plaintiffs are Tianming Wang, Dong Han, Yongjun Meng, Liangcai Sun, Youli Wang, Qingchun Xu, and Duxin Yang. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
U.S. District Court for the NMI Chief Judge Ramona V. Manglona has denied as moot…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[900],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-295820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295820"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295820\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}