{"id":489563,"date":"2026-01-03T14:03:24","date_gmt":"2026-01-03T14:03:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/489563\/"},"modified":"2026-01-03T14:03:24","modified_gmt":"2026-01-03T14:03:24","slug":"hoboken-cannabis-company-lawsuit-against-former-mayor-can-proceed-court-rules","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/489563\/","title":{"rendered":"Hoboken cannabis company lawsuit against former mayor can proceed, court rules"},"content":{"rendered":"

A New Jersey appeals court has cleared the way for a Hoboken cannabis company to proceed with a lawsuit against a former mayor who the firm says torpedoed its dispensary application in a political deal.<\/p>\n

A panel of appeals court judges ruled Tuesday that Nature\u2019s Touch can move forward with a lawsuit claiming then-Hoboken Mayor Ravi Bhalla intentionally blocked its cannabis dispensary application after a city board endorsed it. The lawsuit says Bhalla blocked the application as a political favor for outgoing Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop, whose wife co-owns a competing dispensary.<\/p>\n

Bhalla has denied any wrongdoing. His attorneys didn\u2019t respond to requests to comment on the judge\u2019s ruling.<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for Fulop denied the allegations and said the two mayors never spoke about the matter.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs has been fully explained and vetted, no one in Mayor Fulop\u2019s family has ever applied for a cannabis license in Hoboken or anywhere else, making these claims entirely false and undermining any credibility from the start,\u201d Kim Wallace-Scalcione, press secretary for Jersey City\u2019s mayor\u2019s office, said in a statement. <\/p>\n

\u201cSecondly, the tenant who rents space from the building Jaclyn Fulop owns has a lease that is not dependent on any cannabis-related approvals, further discrediting these accusations,\u201d Wallace-Scalcione said.<\/p>\n

The Fulops are not named as defendants in the lawsuit.<\/p>\n

Fulop announced last year he would not seek another term as Jersey City mayor<\/a> and take a job as head of Partnership for New York City<\/a>, a business coalition.<\/p>\n

Bhalla<\/a> also opted not to seek a third term as mayor in Hoboken last year. He won a seat in the state Assembly in November.<\/p>\n

The Hoboken Cannabis Review Board approved the application for the Nature\u2019s Touch dispensary in 2022, according to court records. But Bhalla didn\u2019t sign the required letter of support, effectively killing the application. <\/p>\n

Weeks later, the board approved an application for another Hoboken dispensary co-owned by Fulop\u2019s wife, Jaclyn Fulop, according to the complaint.<\/p>\n

Nature\u2019s Touch didn\u2019t sue the city or Bhalla until May 2024 because that\u2019s when the alleged scheme came to light, the company said.<\/p>\n

Court filings in a separate whistleblower lawsuit filed by former Hoboken official Pantaleo \u201cLeo\u201d Pellegrini against the city claimed Fulop was \u201cextremely upset and very angry\u201d about the board\u2019s decision to support Nature\u2019s Touch\u2019s application because his wife planned to open a competing dispensary in Hoboken. <\/p>\n

Bhalla allegedly said he would be \u201cquashing\u201d Nature\u2019s Touch\u2019s application and, in exchange, Fulop promised to provide legal work for Bhalla\u2019s private law firm, the lawsuit claims. <\/p>\n

Bhalla\u2019s legal team sought to dismiss the cannabis company\u2019s case, arguing that Nature\u2019s Touch filed its claims too late and the allegations lacked merit. The former mayor\u2019s lawyers said the company could have sued sooner and there wasn\u2019t any evidence Bhalla acted improperly.<\/p>\n

The case now heads back to the lower court. Lawyers for Nature\u2019s Touch will seek documents and testimony to support their claim that political motivations and personal gain influenced the licensing decision. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe want justice,\u201d said Vincent Sicari, attorney for Nature\u2019s Touch. \u201cMy client just wanted the opportunity to run a business.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf in fact it\u2019s proven that the allegations in the whistleblower complaint and our complaint are true, we want the people involved to step forward, not only pay the damages, but can we finally get a mea culpa? Can we finally get elected officials to say they were wrong and apologize? We need accountability,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A New Jersey appeals court has cleared the way for a Hoboken cannabis company to proceed with a…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":489564,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-489563","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-city","11":"tag-newyork","12":"tag-newyorkcity","13":"tag-ny","14":"tag-nyc","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-united-states-of-america","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","19":"tag-us","20":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115831544717648461","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=489563"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489563\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/489564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=489563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=489563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=489563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}