Three foreign chefs who sued one of Britain’s oldest yacht clubs after claiming they were fired for being ‘not British’ have lost their racial discrimination case.
Marian Coltofean, Monika Banasiak and Elisabete Dos Santos Rocha were fired from Royal Harwich Yacht Club, in Suffolk, after they were caught fiddling their time sheets – but claimed it was over their nationality.
The trio took the historic club, which was founded in 1843 and has received multiple royal endorsements, to an employment tribunal in Norwich.
But the workers’ claims were dismissed after it was agreed they had conspired to falsely claim pay for dozens of extra hours.
Mr Coltofean, who is Romanian, was the club’s catering manager, while Ms Banasiak, who is Polish, and Ms Rocha, who is Portuguese, were both chefs. They joined the club in 2021, 2011 and 2015 respectively.
They were the only foreign nationals in the club’s catering team.
Royal Harwich Yacht Club is a prestigious sports club with around 600 members in Woolverstone, on the River Orwell, just south of Ipswich.
It received Royal Patronage – endorsement from the royal family – from the Dowager Queen Adelaide in 1845, and has since received the endorsement from the likes of Queen Victoria and Prince Philip.
Marian Coltofean, left, and Monika Banasiak, two of the three foreign chefs who claimed they had been fired as a result of racial discrimination
Three chefs were found to have claimed for more time than they worked at the historic yacht club
Mr Coltofean and Ms Banasiak have since opened a new restaurant in Woolverstone Marina
The club has also played a role in arctic expeditions, including when Sir John Franklin’s widow hired the club to find her late husband’s lost ship after the Admiralty failed to do so.
Mr Coltofean was the line manager of Ms Banasiak and Ms Rocha, and was responsible for signing off their claimed working hours, which they logged themselves.
Mr Coltofean and Ms Banasiak were in a relationship at that and living together – and have since gone on to open another restaurant in Woolverstone Marina called Monimar.
One evening in September, a manager leaving the club grew concerned that Ms Banasiak and Ms Rocha had not arrived for their shifts in time for a dinner event.
She checked the shift logs the following day to see what time they arrived, and was surprised to discover it logged as before she left herself the previous evening.
This manager reported the concern and an investigation was launched.
The club compared the times noted down by Ms Banasiak and Ms Rocha with the times they actually logged in and out of the alarm system.
It looked at timesheets from the previous three months, and found that both women had cheated the system to try to maximise their pay.
It found that Ms Banasiak had logged a total of 896 minutes more than she actually worked, which is nearly 15 hours in total.
Similarly, Ms Rocha had claimed for 716 minutes, or nearly 12 hours, more than she had worked.
It was found that on 19 occasions the women logged exactly the same arrival times, despite the fact that they lived 40 minutes apart and were unlikely to arrive together.
Mr Coltofean had signed off on these hours, and was deemed likely to have been part of the conspiracy, due to his close relationship with the women.
All three were dismissed in October 2023, and later sued the club for unfair dismissal and race discrimination.
At the tribunal, the trio alleged ‘the dismissals were motivated by the fact that they were foreign nationals’, and that the club had ‘manufactured’ evidence of them fiddling the timesheets.
The club, meanwhile, insisted that the dismissals were carried out ‘for a fair reason’ and there was ‘no evidence’ that nationality had come into it.
Employment Judge Richard Wood concluded there was no evidence of ‘less favourable treatment’ towards the foreign workers.
He said: ‘We accept that the club appeared to have little if any written rules about filling out time sheets. We take the view that it might have been better to have spelt out some of the matters discussed within a staff handbook.
‘However, as we have found, the key issues in dispute in this case are obvious and matters of common sense. We find that the way the [workers] were filling out time sheets, or allowing them to be filled out, was clearly not appropriate.
‘It seems that [they] had convinced themselves that it was acceptable and permitted (to the extent that they had given it any thought).
‘It is likely that the practice described had been going on for much longer than the three month period covered by the schedules. However, misconduct is rarely made appropriate because it continues undetected for long periods.
‘We find in this case that the club was not aware of how time sheets were being filled out and extra hours claimed. We are satisfied that the club’s investigation of these matters was full and reasonable. This ground of less favourable treatment is not made out on the evidence.’
The judge added that the dismissals were ‘unrelated to the fact that the workers were not British nationals’.