Jun 11
2025
What wage theft allegations?
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For a eight time Wednesday, the Niagara County Industrial Development Agency approved subsidies for a fast food restaurateur under investigation for wage theft.
And just like every other subsidy the IDA has authorized for Muhammad Shoaib over the past two years, the $48,750 grant garnered no discussion and was approved unanimously.
Fast food restaurants are generally ineligible for any IDA assistance under New York law. But because Shoaib is opening many of his stores in downtown Niagara Falls, IDA leaders have allowed him to exploit a loophole that allows tax breaks and grants for retail establishments in “economically distressed” areas.
As a result, Shoaib’s businesses have obtained nearly $780,000 in assistance from the IDA in the past 2 ½ years, plus $50,000 from the City of Niagara Falls. The subsidies have gone towards a network of franchised pizza shops, burger joints and stands hawking juices, ice cream and other sweets.
IDA officials argue they’ve supported so many of Shoaib’s businesses because the Papa Johns, Moe’s Southwest Grill, A&W and dessert shops he’s opening keep tourist families on the U.S. side of Niagara Falls. Plus, they say, he’s creating jobs in a downtown that lacks them.
Numerous employees, however, have accused Shoaib’s businesses of cheating them out of pay, as first reported by Investigative Post and later expanded on. They say their employer withheld tip money, refused to pay overtime and, in some instances, failed to pay the state minimum wage.
The state Department of Labor has since launched an investigation.
“[Shoaib’s wife] said specifically to me, ‘No one gets overtime. I don’t want no one getting overtime. I’m not paying anyone for overtime,’” a former manager told Investigative Post in March. “[She said it] exactly like that, verbatim, those three ways, back to back, word for word.”
Another former manager said Shoaib’s wife, Hina Qureshi, asserted workers got enough tips via cash.
“You could tell her it’s illegal until you’re blue in the face and she doesn’t care,” the person said.
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroomIDA Chairman Mark Onesi told Investigative Post in March that the employees’ claims are “not our business. We’re not investigators.”
“[The employees] are not being stolen from unless somebody says, an authority, that they’re being stolen from,” he said.
And so, on Wednesday, Onesi and his fellow IDA board members voted yes to cut a nearly $49,000 check to Shoaib so he can open a Church’s Chicken in the Hyatt Hotel. Onesi and IDA Executive Director Andrea Klyczek both refused to comment on the vote.
The only comment on the matter came from IDA attorney Mark Gabriele, who noted the agency would have awarded the funds sooner had it not been for an internal delay. The funds came from the Cataract Tourism Fund, established in 2017 by state Sen. Rob Ortt.
Before he first turned to the IDA for cash in 2023, Shoaib opened 11 Papa Johns, Church’s Chickens and other establishments in Western New York and Ontario without public assistance.
When the IDA was debating his first round of tax breaks in January 2023, he told Investigative Post he didn’t need the agency’s funds.
“This is a little help, but we are able to do it without it as well,” Shoaib told Investigative Post at the time.
IDAs aren’t technically supposed to give tax breaks to companies that don’t need the money. Shoaib subsequently backtracked and IDA Chairman Mark Onesi accused a reporter of misquoting the business owner.
“[Businesses] are not coming here. It is a depressed area. We need jobs,” Onesi argued at the time. “I don’t think you understand that concept, that you give a little to get a little.”
Neither Shoaib nor his attorney, Matthew Miller of Rupp Pflazgraf, returned phone calls seeking comment Wednesday.
