Alleged Sexual Misconduct on the Pilgrims’ Train to Lourdes Government's attempts to cover up Social Services scandal fails Allegations of serious sexual misconduct on a train taking Social Services Agency staff and those for whose care they were responsible on a Government-sponsored pilgrimage to Lourdes surfaced this week at the Industrial Tribunal. The Tribunal is hearing the appeal of Joanna Hernandez against her wrongful dismissal by the Agency. Quizzed by the Tribunal chairman Isaac Massias about the evidence expected to be given on the string of Government and Agency employees which Opposition Leader Joe Bossano has asked to be subpoenaed to give evidence at the Tribunal hearing, Hernandez said that one of the agency staff would provide details of a sexual "threesome" said to have taken place in a compartment of the train taking the pilgrims to the sanctuary renowned for the medical cures among its supplicants.
She (the witness) would also give evidence under oath of the sexual abuse by a staff member of at least one woman in the Agency's care, as well as physical and verbal abuse and punishments of others, Hernandez explained.
The Tribunal will sit again today (fri) for the chairman to continue to hear submissions by Mark Isola (of Triay & Triay - who is representing the Government-controlled Social Services Agency) in which he hopes to reduce the number of witnesses - and particularly those who Bossano is requesting should be subpoenaed. All told, Hernandez had hoped to call more than 40 witnesses, including Yvette del Agua the new Minister of Health who at the time of the alleged offences - and, later when Hernandez was dismissed - was the Minister responsible for Social Services and also chaired the Agency's Board.
If all of these gave evidence and were cross-questioned, and then if there was any need for new witnesses to be called in rebuttal, the actual hearing could take up to 30 days and would stretch over an ever longer period, Isola argued.
ARGUMENT PROVOKED MUFFLED LAUGHTER This would add to the cost of the Tribunal and waste more time, he added - provoking muffled laughter from observers in the seats set aside for the public and the Press. The hearing has already stretched over more than a year as the respondents (the Government/ Agency) challenged Hernandez's right to appeal to the Tribunal on the basis of a remarkable but complex argument - and one which many found laughable - about the length of a year and how the start of a week should be calculated.
Both the Supreme Court and later the Appeal Court dismissed the argument, awarding costs to Hernandez.
Arguing the need for witnesses to be subpoenaed - although most had already indicated to himself or Hernandez what they would say - Bossano pointed out that they were afraid of victimisation by their employers (the Government and the Agency) if they were seen to have come forward to give evidence voluntarily. It was "safer" for them to have been made to give evidence. (And it would also help them in terms of protecting their leave entitlements, Massias suggested.)
Bossano added that he and Hernandez had been reluctant even to provide the respondents with a list of the names of those they wished to subpoena as these needed "to protect themselves against the Government knowing they would come and support the arguments of the claimant."
They could not come to give evidence voluntarily because their employer the Government "are the nasty people they are, they [the witnesses] know they are likely to clobber them."
Among those they intended to call - the Tribunal has already been given witness statements from more than 20 people who will not need to be subpoenaed - would be people "who can give a view as to her performance [in the Education Department and the Agency] and her ability to meet the ‘high standards'; which the Agency claimed to have set and which it alleged she had failed to meet...and which had led to her dismissal."
There would also be evidence as to whether the Agency itself had met the ‘high standards' it claimed to have set - as well as whether those employed as managers of the Dr Giraldi Home, both before and after Hernandez held the post, had also met these ‘high standards'.
Allegations contained in the voluntary witness statements presented to the Tribunal suggest that until the arrival of Hernandez standards of care, management and policy fell far below those applied and expected elsewhere in Europe. They also contain shocking claims about the way the Agency was mismanaged, of abuses of those being cared for, a cavalier and casual attitude towards drug control on the part of some Agency staff, and instances of sexual shenanigans.
(Copies of documents containing these allegations have been handed to the GSLP/Liberal Alliance as well as to Keith Azopardi's Progressive Democratic Party. Those who have read the statements have expressed their shock and dismay at some of the allegations. They have also prompted calls for a full public inquiry into the allegations and the running of the Agency by the trade unions TGWU and ACTS section of Unite as well as the Gibraltar Local Disability Movement.)
At one stage during several heated exchanges between Isola and Bossano, Isola asked: "Is the Tribunal going to be an inquiry into the Agency or an inquiry into whether she [Hernandez] was dismissed for whistle-blowing?"
"We're talking about in this case the agency being positively Dickensian and they [the Government] wanted to keep it under wraps and sacked her to silence her," Bossano retorted in a response to Isola's challenge to the number of teachers and Agency staff on the list of those whose subpoena was sought. "They do not want people to say things in the open and under oath."
ANOTHER DELAYING TACTIC? Isola had argued that it was important to show not only the relevance of the witnesses to the issues which were in dispute but also the necessity for calling them, and in support of this cited a lengthy precedent in which an Iranian working in Britain claimed that he had been unfairly dismissed on the grounds of racialism. Bossano (as well as observers) pondered the relevance of this. Could it be another red herring... another delaying tactic to involve turgid legal argument, one observer wondered?
Defending the Agency, Isola told the Tribunal that "if there were shortcomings in the running of the Giraldi Home, that was what the complainant was brought in to manage and [her failure to do so] thus a reason for her dismissal." And he suggested that evidence form various educationists as to Hernandez abilities while employed by the Education Department and before obtaining the post as manager of the Giraldi Home was irrelevant.
"She got the job," he said. "And the agency would have engaged her because they thought she could do the job."
Earlier Bossano had argued that evidence from the head teacher of the school where Hernandez had worked as a braille expert helping bring children with disabilities into main-stream education and from others would show that the Education Department had "wanted to keep her in the Department when she was approached to apply for the job with the agency".
DISTURBING ALLEGATIONS If, as Bossano had claimed at the start of this week's hearing, the Government has "done everything in its power for this case not to be heard" in an attempt to prevent the Agency's dirty linen being aired in public, the ploy patently has failed. Outlining what evidence each of those for whom a subpoena was sought would give, Hernandez laid out a chronicle of serious and disturbing allegations.
She herself have been "shocked and horrified" by what she found when she took up the Giraldi post - from which she had been sacked at the end of her probationary year because she "would not be party to a cover up".
Dr. Galloway, one of the witnesses she hoped to subpoena, had "tried to do something" about the situation and wanted to "go public, but was given a disciplinary," Hernandez claimed. She had discussed the position with Daniel Feetham, who was her lawyer at the time and who, with her, had "tried to work with the Government".
"I was told to ‘keep quiet or lose your job'," Hernandez told the Tribunal hearing. "They [her superiors] wanted to be protected". On numerous occasions she had sent to her team leader her reports on the state of the Giraldi Home and her serious concerns and copies of these had been sent to Del Agua.
For the first six months of her tenure the acting C.O. had been Marie Gomez - who would appear as a witness - and later Isobella Tosso had been appointed to head the agency.
(Del Agua and Tosso - who has left the Agency and is believed to be working in the UK - are the only two on the subpoena list Hernandez has not spoken to. However, Tosso is regarded as a ‘key witness' by the respondents and it is hoped that she would be at the beginning of the list of witnesses according to Isola.)
When the full hearing eventually begins - and a date for this is expected to be set today - and if Isola does not persuade the Tribunal chairman that matters which are not directly related to Hernandez's dismissal are irrelevant, a clinical psychiatrist is expected to give evidence on allegations of sexual abuse and a serving female CID officer will also detail allegations of sexual abuse.
"She was appalled and neither of us could understand why the case never was prosecuted," Hernandez claimed. "A person had told senior staff that she had been sexually molested, but nothing had been done...
"When I went in [as manager of Giraldi] I had some good workers but was told that if you talked you were bullied. Twelve staff members made various reports to me and I put these into a report to my superiors, but was told by the C.O. to put it under the carpet."
http://www.vox.gi/Local/Alleged_Sexual_Misconduct_Train_Lourdes-30112007.html 
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