Not Guilty Your Honour
Towards the end of June we wrote ‘Amscreen Faces Sexism Tribunal‘ as that weekend’s UK papers were full of allegations of ‘lewd’ remarks (allegedly) made by a former Apprentice winner (Lee McQueen) to Hanna Sebright (ex-owner of Electronic Health Media which was bought by Amscreen just before Christmas 2008).
A statement on behalf of Lord Sugar and Amscreen has just been widely distributed to the press and it reads as follows…
Hanna Sebright, a former employee of Amscreen Group Limited, of which Lord Sugar was Chairman until 1 July 2009, has withdrawn all claims raised in London East Employment Tribunal against Amscreen and the four individual named Respondents, including Lord Sugar. In particular, Ms Sebright now accepts that the claims she raised against Lord Sugar in his personal capacity were entirely without foundation.
Lord Sugar and Amscreen will be making no further comment.
The four respondents named in the original claim were Lord Sugar, Simon Sugar, Lee McQueen and Sean Keenan.
It will be interesting to see what the mainstream press make of it, if indeed there is (still) that much interest in it. The statement says that Ms Sebright has withdrawn all the claims she made but the statement doesn’t say if they were ever accurate or not.
The statement also says that “Ms Sebright now accepts that the claims she raised against Lord Sugar in his personal capacity were entirely without foundation” that gets Lord Sugar off the hook but doesn’t say anything about the claims made against the other respondents.
The cynic in us says that Lord Sugar has probably been told to clear it up in case there’s any more bad press. We have a general election looming in the UK and Labour won’t want any gaffes in the run up to an election, Ed
It’s either one of two things then; some of the claims were true and an out of court settlement was made or none of the claims were true.
The statement, to us at least, doesn’t make any of that any clearer.
Follow DailyDOOH