Royal Yacht employee to receive £2,750 sexual harassment compensation

Monday 25 September 2023

A hotel employee who held a female member of staff around her waist sexually harassed her, the Employment Tribunal has found.

The tribunal awarded Annastashia Wango a total of £2,750 compensation as a result of the incident at the Royal Yacht Hotel, which was captured on the hotel's CCTV cameras.

However, additional claims of harassment and victimisation were dismissed by the tribunal.

Ms Wango had claimed that the incident, involving her superior Sandro Moniz, was exacerbated by the fact that she was "from the Bantu peoples" for whom being touched on the waist amounted to a serious sexual assault.

Announcing the tribunal's findings, Deputy Chair Advocate Ian Jones, sitting with panel members Anne Southern and Michael de la Haye, said that trying to pigeon-hole "Bantu culture" – which embraced 400 distinct ethnic African groups or cultures speaking between 600 and 700 distinct languages – was "ambitious" but he said it was, in any case, "more of a distraction or irrelevance than anything else".

Advocate Jones said: "In the view of the tribunal it is an uncontroversial and indeed axiomatic proposition that touching anyone, when they do not want to be touched, is entirely unacceptable.

"It is the more unacceptable if it happens in the workplace and, in the view of the tribunal, aggravated if the person doing the unwanted touching lays their hands on a more junior employee for whom they are responsible."

Advocate Jones continued: "The point the tribunal is keen to stress is that it is not Ms Wango’s ethnic heritage that makes Mr Moniz’s conduct a serious issue. It is Mr Moniz’s conduct. The tribunal considers that this proposition can be straight-forwardly tested by asking itself the question, would it have made any difference if Ms Wango was white and from Trinity?

"It seems to the tribunal that the answer is plainly not and that the focus of the tribunal should be on the conduct of Mr Moniz and...what Mr Moniz did to Ms Wango would have been equally serious if he had done it to any other woman or man, if the conduct was unwanted for the same reason."

The tribunal concluded: "The claims for harassment and victimisation are dismissed. The claim for sexual harassment succeeds and the Claimant is awarded £2,750.00 by way of compensation."

Advocate Jones directed that Ms Wango should receive the £2,750 compensation within 14 days.