Mathata “Moe” Mpela is being sued for nearly $1 million in unpaid wages after allegedly recruiting college students for a green-energy apprenticeship that never paid them.
The Brooklyn-based founder of Nalane Green Solutions, Mpela hired more than 20 students from CUNY and Howard University for his “Green Apprentice Program” in 2024 and 2025, promising $22 to $40 an hour to mentor high schoolers in green technology at Transit Tech High School in East New York. Court papers filed in Brooklyn Federal Court say the students bought into his mission to “empower communities, reduce environmental impact, and drive economic growth,” but never received a single paycheck.
Geovanni Luti, a 4.0 student from Howard, said he turned down a lucrative offer at Collins Aerospace to work for Mpela and moved from Texas to a rat-infested Bronx apartment for the job. “I genuinely thought I’d be making a change, and I genuinely thought he was a man of vision who wanted to make an impact on the community by taking people from our community to do that,” Luti told the Post.
Turns out, Luti said, he actually worked on grant proposals to fund Mpela’s plan to “manufacture EV chargers” in the basement of Transit Tech High School. “I found [that] to be extremely dangerous and unethical, especially since he wanted the Transit Tech students — because they’re at a technical school — to work on manufacturing them and then sell it to the market,” he said.
“This is infrastructure that can kill people, and I had nobody supervising me.”
Julie Liu, 26, a CUNY graduate student, was promised $27 an hour as a supervisor last summer and helped lead the class-action suit. “It certainly makes me feel deceived,” she said. “It makes me feel like my interest in serving others was just weaponized for someone else’s gain.” Most students learned about Nalane through their school’s career offices, and Liu told the Post that first-round interviews took place in the engineering school’s dean’s office. “We trusted this start-up company, even though we’ve never heard of it before, because we trusted our administrators at City College,” she said in an interview, adding that 32 students from the engineering school were each owed thousands in unpaid wages.
Alana Marcial, 20, another Howard student from this past summer, said she never got paid for any of the 636 hours she worked for Mpela after turning down two other job offers. “Honestly, I feel exploited,” Marcial said. “For us to be presented with the initiative to do good in our community… It’s gut-wrenching.”
Mpela, when asked about the allegedly owed money, blamed delays on a New York state grant. The plaintiffs’ lawyers called that excuse a blatant lie, claiming that grant couldn’t have even gone toward owed wages. Mpela gave The Post similar excuses while insisting he only owes $53,000 to the students. “The mistake I made was to hire the 2026 team without getting a confirmation from one of the potential fiscal sponsors,” Mpela said in an email, adding that he apologized and stopped the most recent work in July.
The plaintiffs’ lawyer, Chaya Gourarie, partner at the Bell Law Group, told the Post, “We intend to hold Moe fully accountable. These students deserve to be heard. Their case sends a clear message: every worker who is wrongfully denied their wages has a voice.” CUNY, which is not accused of wrongdoing, said it is working to support impacted students. The school investigated when students raised wage issues and banned Nalane from CUNY recruiting systems. “We cannot support the unethical behavior and illegal behavior of this employer,” Career Director Katie Nailler wrote in an email filed in federal court.
Even after CUNY students first sued in April 2025, Mpela proceeded to recruit for a second summer — this time from Howard University, court documents allege. In a video of a meeting shared with The Post, Mpela admitted to angry student workers that he hired that summer’s students despite knowing he had no money to pay them. City records show Nalane Green Solutions received a $25,000 contract through the city’s education department last year but has only spent $1,700 so far this July.
“This ends now,” Marcial said. “You’re not gonna live in delusion anymore…. Now you’re not gonna hurt any other students anymore.”