D Dimov v Mr Gurhan Mustafa T/A Mambocino / Riverside Fish and Steakhouse and 1 other — 2022

The tribunal found that Mr Dimov, a Bulgarian national who arrived in England in 2016 with little English and no family, started work at Mambocino in August 2016 and later worked evenings at Riverside. It held that Mr Mustafa was his employer, that there was no contract or Mambocino payslips, and that Mr Dimov was vulnerable because he did not know his rights or what his pay should have been.

On pay and holiday, the tribunal found that from 12 October 2017, after a five-week break, he worked seven days a week and was paid cash in hand below the National Minimum Wage. The reasons include a period-by-period table of what he was paid and what he should have been paid, and the tribunal held that the first respondent unlawfully deducted wages. It also found that he was never encouraged to take paid annual leave and never paid holiday, so the Working Time Regulations claim succeeded and the entitlement carried over until termination on 4 November 2019. The reasons record liability and entitlement but do not set out a final quantified award.

On race harassment, the tribunal rejected the alleged first assault and the alleged head-butt by Ms Joinaitis, but accepted a December 2017 incident in which Mr Mustafa pushed Mr Dimov into a hallway and an April or May 2019 incident in which he grabbed him by the throat, as well as repeated verbal abuse using words such as idiot, animal, pig, donkey, cow and gypsy. It held that this treatment was unwanted, humiliating and related to the claimant's Bulgarian nationality/race, both because his vulnerability as a recent non-English-speaking arrival was intrinsically connected to that characteristic and because the respondent failed to explain the treatment on any other basis. The direct discrimination claim was dismissed because the same conduct had already been found to amount to harassment, and the tribunal held the discrimination claim was in time as conduct extending over a period.