A pizza chef sacked after he was said to have made “creepy” comments to girls as young as 12 and who used a customer database to send “inappropriate” texts to a 16-year-old customer has lost his unfair dismissal claim.
Texts sent to the 16-year-old girl by Syed Saeed Akhtar included a remark about how he could “wait another two years” to be her boyfriend, the Workplace Relations Commission was told last year.
The tribunal was hearing a challenge by Akhtar to his sacking from Jin And Li Food Ltd, operator of a Mizzoni Pizza shop, under the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977, a claim dismissed in a decision published on Tuesday.
Daniel Johnson, for the employer, said it came to the business’s attention in September 2024 that Akhtar had been “making inappropriate comments to young girls” as young as 12 or 13.
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Akhtar had remarked they were “very beautiful” and “little princesses” – remarks described by the girls as “creepy”, Johnson said.
Akhtar also made “lewd gestures with his hands” after the girls left the pizza shop “suggesting they had a female figure”, it was also submitted.
The pizza shop’s owner, Jin Hintao, gave Akhtar a verbal warning at that point, Johnson said.
However, the following month, Johnson said, it was brought to the management’s attention that Akhtar had used the company customer database to send “inappropriate text messages” to the 16-year-old daughter of a customer, the WRC noted.
The child’s mother gave evidence to the WRC late last year about how her daughter had been babysitting for a neighbour and she returned to tell her she had a “creepy” text from Akhtar asking: “What u have plan for weekend?”
The mother said she confronted Akhtar about it at the shop and saw the worker had a picture of her daughter on his phone.
She said Akhtar told her: “I don’t do things like that. I’m married and I’ve two kids.” .
In reply, she said: “I said I know you’re married and you’ve two kids. Everything gets around.”
Further to the text message, the witness said her daughter told her of other comments by Akhtar.
These included how he could “wait another two years to be [the girl’s] boyfriend”.
Her daughter also told her Akhtar made a remark about showering at work and had told her to “ring him and that he will show her that he showers”.
When Akhtar cross-examined the girl’s mother, he “acknowledged that he had sent the message”, but insisted he “intended to send it to an adult woman” – calling it a “total mistake”.
The text messages between Akhtar and the girl were presented by the company at the WRC hearing and the claimant acknowledged sending these, adjudicator Lefre de Burgh noted.
The complainant said: “I tried everything. I accept I text her. I apologise.”
However, the claimant denied his employer’s statement about the verbal warning the month before about his alleged behaviour when the younger teenage girl was in the shop. That “never happened”, he said.
Akhtar’s employer, Hintao, was asked why he was “worried about contact between his staff and young girls”.
“My shop is a small shop. [The area] is a small place. Everybody knows everybody,” Hintao said.
“If word spread around about comments from my staff member, it would have a very serious impact on the reputation of my shop and on me personally.”
He told Akhtar in a letter dismissing him on October 25th, 2024, how texting the 16-year-old girl by itself was “gross misconduct justifying dismissal without notice” on its own.
He said the inappropriate comments set out to him in writing by the girl’s mother were “sexual in nature and totally inappropriate” and amounted to gross misconduct.
Rejecting Akhtar’s complaint about his dismissal, De Burgh wrote in her decision that “summary dismissal without notice was both procedurally and substantively fair”.
