Municipal police officer wins appeal over compensation award

Derek Achong

Se­nior Re­porter

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A se­nior mu­nic­i­pal po­lice of­fi­cer has won his ap­peal over on­ly be­ing award­ed min­i­mal com­pen­sa­tion af­ter his pro­mo­tion was ter­mi­nat­ed over is­sues with the per­mis­sion he got to leave his pre­vi­ous role. 

De­liv­er­ing a judg­ment this week, Ap­pel­late Judges Ge­of­frey Hen­der­son, Eleanor Don­ald­son-Hon­ey­well and Joan Charles up­held Glen Charles’ (no re­la­tion) ap­peal over the quan­tum of dam­ages he was award­ed. 

Ac­cord­ing to the ev­i­dence, in 2017, Charles, a T&T Mu­nic­i­pal Po­lice Su­per­in­ten­dent as­signed to the Port-of-Spain City Cor­po­ra­tion, was of­fered the po­si­tion of Mu­nic­i­pal Se­nior Su­per­in­ten­dent with­in the Min­istry of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment for a term of three years. 

Be­fore tak­ing up the ap­point­ment, Charles sought no-pay leave from the cor­po­ra­tion. 

Short­ly af­ter be­ing pub­licly an­nounced and as­sum­ing his du­ties in the new role, an is­sue arose con­cern­ing the doc­u­men­tary proof of his leave of ab­sence and the sig­na­to­ry, who pur­port­ed­ly ap­proved it. 

Charles, through his lawyer Farai Hove-Ma­sai­sai, of Hove and As­so­ciates, filed the case af­ter he was told that he could no longer per­form the role and he was forced to re­turn to his pre­vi­ous po­si­tion. 

Charles’ case was up­held by a High Court Judge, who found that he had a valid con­tract with the min­istry and that he had been grant­ed the no-pay leave. 

While the judge found that Charles was en­ti­tled to the dif­fer­ence in salary he would have re­ceived had he been able to com­plete the con­tract, he was on­ly award­ed $5,000 in nom­i­nal dam­ages based on his al­leged fail­ure to pro­vide ev­i­dence to aid in do­ing the cal­cu­la­tion. 

The judge al­so found that he was not en­ti­tled to ex­em­plary dam­ages to pun­ish the egre­gious ac­tions he faced. The State was or­dered to pay him $14,000 in le­gal costs. 

The ap­peal pan­el found that the judge was wrong to on­ly award nom­i­nal dam­ages and in de­cid­ing against ex­em­plary dam­ages with­out pro­vid­ing rea­sons for such. 

The pan­el di­rect­ed that the com­pen­sa­tion be re­assessed by a High Court Mas­ter at a lat­er date. 

Charles was al­so rep­re­sent­ed by Cas­sidy Mitchell-Ab­erdeen and John-Paul Bel­mar. The Of­fice of the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al was rep­re­sent­ed by Ste­fan Jaikaran and Rad­ha Sookdeo.