A former VP of Juul claims that he was fired because he exposed the company’s plans to sell expired and contaminated vape pods.
It seems that Juul will be catching no breaks any time soon. Following the widely reported vape illness that has affected hundreds, this past Tuesday a former executive of the company filed a lawsuit, claiming that Juul shipped out a million contaminated pods without informing their customers.
According to Buzzfeed News, Siddharth Breja, Juul’s former senior vice president of global finances and the man who’s filing the lawsuit, says he was fired after he raised several complaints regarding the contaminated pods. Breja says that the contaminated pods began to be sold in February 2019. By this time, the pods were over a year old, so Breja suggested that the company should at least add a “best by” label on the box.
Breja claims that CEO Kevin Burns responded that, “Half our customers are drunk and vaping like mo-fos, who the f*** is going to notice the quality of our pods?”
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Lead photo courtesy of Vaping360.
Breja also says that on March 12, he learned in an executive meeting of the presence of contaminated batches of mint e-liquid. Over a million pods were made from this liquid, all being sold to customers. According to the lawsuit, Breja was terminated on March 21 with Juul claiming that he had misrepresented himself as the chief financial officer at Uber. Breja denies this.
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Although Burns was replaced by a different CEO last September, he spoke to Buzzfeed News regarding the lawsuit. “I never said this, or anything remotely close to this, period. As CEO, I had the company make huge investments in product quality and the facts will show this claim is absolutely false and pure fiction,” reads his statement.
While Breja’s lawyer claims that his client was fired because he spoke up regarding the public safety of costumers, Juul claims that the lawsuit is baseless and that Breja was let go “because he failed to demonstrate the leadership qualities needed in his role.”
