Sunday, June 23, 2019

Scotland: Leading Islamophobia campaigner branded “untruthful” in a sexual harassment case

(Glasgow)  The general secretary of the Muslim Council of Scotland(MCoS) is Shaukat Sultan, he is the treasurer of the local Labour party in Glasgow Southern and has played a role on the Holyrood (Scottish parliament) crossparty group on “Tackling Islamophobia".  

Shaukat Sultan
You’d think that such a person would make a credible witness in a court case regards sexual harassment, think again. Mr Sultan used to work at Roshni a glasgow based charity set up to help protect vulnerable adults and children from within ethnic minority communities from abuse. However it crashed and burned in 2017 after its founder Millionaire Ali Khan was found guilty of mental and sexualabuse of a female worker. 

It appears after she rejected his advances, he cut her hours  threatened her with dismissal, verbal and physical abuse, made “sexually explicit remarks to her” and encouraged her to flirt with potential advertisers. He was also found to have threatened to disclose intimate details of victims personal life to third parties and made threats of violence towards her family. Anyway he was directed to pay for his harassment along with Mr Sultan who it transpired touched base with the victim’s stepfather in which to get her to drop the case.  The employment tribunal ordered Roshni and Ali Khan to jointly pay the victim £74,647, which included £35,000 for injury to feelings and £20,000 for personal injury, but she never received a penny as both  directors quit within days of the remedy hearing. However, the same case resulted in criticism of Sultan, who was described on the Roshni website as its “longest serving team member”.
  •  “We found that Shaukat Sultan was not credible when he told the Tribunal that he did not share with Mr Khan the reason why he had asked for the claimant’s stepfather’s telephone number.”  
  • “We found that Mr Sultan was seeking to have pressure placed on the claimant to withdraw the claim. Those were steps taken on behalf of the first respondent [Roshni].”
  • The judge added: “We also found that Shaukat Sultan had been untruthful in giving his evidence to the Employment Tribunal about the events of 11 May 2015.”

Since his day in court in 2015 Mr Sultan has since risen to become general secretary of the MCoS, which is an “accord” of Muslim associations, mosques and institutions north of the border and sat on the Scottish Governments cross party team on combating ‘Islamophobia’  which is a form of abuse. 
even with the above court case been reported in the media. The funny thing is after Roshni closed, a new charity 'Engage me' was born . The Scottish  Daily Record reported that  key staff at Roshni – which means light in Urdu – have helped set up a new group called Engage Me, based at the same Glasgow city centre site. Logos for the organisations have striking similarities as is its mission statement:
 “raise awareness of the existence of sexual, physical and psychological abuse against persons and groups within the minority ethinic communities”