A POPULAR buffet restaurant named Golden Jaguar in KK Mall in Luohu District closed its doors earlier this month, leaving customers with unused prepaid cards, the Southern Metropolis Daily reported.

    Public information showed that the buffet brand, stemming from Taiwan, entered the Chinese mainland market in 2003, with restaurants in Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, Hangzhou, Suzhou and Shenyang. The restaurant in KK Mall had over 100 employees when business was good.

    A customer said that he had bought a 5,000-yuan (US$728) prepaid card at the restaurant, but he found that the restaurant had closed before Qingming Festival. Several other customers said that they still had a few thousand yuan on their prepaid cards after the restaurant closed its doors.

    According to the spokesperson of Kingkey Banner Management Co. Ltd., the restaurant opened in KK Mall in 2010, but its business had been going downhill since 2015. He said that the restaurant had defaulted on payments to suppliers, and it hadn’t paid the rent to the shopping mall in March and April.

    The spokesperson said that the shopping mall had received complaints from customers about the restaurant as they failed to get a refund for their prepaid cards from the restaurant.

    “The restaurant claimed that the total they had received in customer prepayments was more than a few million yuan,” the spokesperson said. “We don’t allow the sale of prepaid cards. We suggested that the restaurant return the prepayments to its customers as it had already defaulted on payments to suppliers.”

    The restaurant’s manager, surnamed Zhang, told the Daily’s reporter by text message that the restaurant wasn’t really shut down, even though its business had been suspended temporarily and its employees were on leave. She refused to disclose more information about the restaurant, and calls to her phone went unanswered Monday.

    According to an official of Guiyuan Subdistrict Office, the restaurant paid its employees’ salaries on time in March, and the office would handle the case following relevant procedures if any back pay was found.

    Golden Jaguar is one of the 17 companies put on file on the city’s economy, trade and information commission’s website for prepaid services. The restaurant’s spokesperson said that customers usually buy prepaid cards as gift cards for their friends, and all of the prepayments received by the restaurant are deposited in a bank account supervised by the government.

    (Zhang Yang)