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Fei Siong Food Management was slapped with a S$4,000 fine today (11 Jan) for one of their outlet’s failure to ensure that diners’ chair were kept to a 1m safe distancing space from other tables.
The outlet in question is the Encik Tan outlet at Orchard Road where Fei Siong Food Management is a parent company of.
Prior to this incident, Fei Siong was given up to eight composition or out of court fines for violations of control orders at other outlets which they owned.
They currently have 150 outlets across Singapore.
Inspected outlet at 313@Somerset
Officers from the Singapore Tourism Board (STB), went to carry out enforcement checks at Encik Tan’s 313@Somerset outlet on 14 May 2021 at about 7.50pm.
They stood and observed the outlet running its operations for about five minutes and thereafter started to measure the distance between chairs of customers dining at the outlet after seeing that no action was taken by the staff to ensure that customers kept to the safe distancing requirements.
Instead of being 1m apart, the distance which the officers measured were 44cm, 79cm and 88cm respectively.
Flouting of rules caused by manpower shortage
In Fei Siong’s defense at a court session, Mr Lew, the lawyer representing Fei Siong said that Fei Siong fell short of the safe management measures due to the lack of manpower at the outlet.
He added that it was dinner time on Friday and the manpower shortage meant that there was inadequate manpower to ensure that diners adhered to the measures.
He asked the court to consider the difficulties faced by Fei Siong in enforcing the rules at its 150 outlets across Singapore, and added that Fei Siong always had a safe management plan for all its outlets and that brand managers will always communicate it to the employees at the outlets.
On top of communicating with the employees on such measures, the managers will also go down to the outlets occasionally to see that the measures are kept.
He ended by saying that the mere few cm which the outlet were short by were not done in defiance.
Penalties
In sentencing, the judge said that the fact where the group had been given composition fines for eight occasions had to be taken into consideration.
Fei Siong could have been given a fine of up to S$10,000 for flouting the measures.
Image source: Google Maps