The treatment of a security guard who worked for hundreds of hours without pay on the doors of shops in central Dublin by a firm which collapsed into liquidation last year amounted to racial discrimination, a tribunal has ruled.
The Workplace Relations Commission has awarded over €8,000 for various employment rights breaches suffered by James Ajibola while he was employed by Best Guard Security Services Ltd (BGSS).
In a decision published on Wednesday, a WRC adjudicator found BGSS had “clearly racially discriminated against people of colour” in its employment practices.
Ajibola has told the tribunal he was left in serious financial difficulty and found himself “borrowing and begging” after being hired and put to work by BGSS as a security guard at shops in central Dublin and its suburbs.
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He was meant to be paid €14.50 an hour and gave his new bosses “the benefit of the doubt” when his pay did not come as expected. He kept working, but never received a pay packet, he said.
Dozens of former BGSS staff have won employment rights claims over non-payment of wages by the firm, whose clients included Centra, Spar and Supervalu stores in Dublin.
The firm’s liquidator has told the WRC it knew of 53 ex-workers subject to “very similar” treatment.
“This sort of systematic and deliberate wage exploitation could not, would not and did not happen to an Irish person,” said the complainant’s trade union rep, Nicola Coleman of the Siptu Workers’ Rights Centre.
She pointed to “white Irish or European” employees of BGSS in supervisory or administrative roles as comparators, and said it was “probable” they were paid.
“This company continued, even after they had complaints upheld against them. They continued to recruit people into their company; they continued to not pay them, and all of those people were black or Asian. It is blatant discrimination. It is racial discrimination,” Coleman said.
She added that what BGSS had done was a template for exploitation that “chimes with the definition of modern slavery” and that the firm had “seemingly get away with it scot-free”.
In his decision on the case, adjudicator Michael McEntee noted the complaints were not resisted by the respondent and concluded that the decision “has to be in the complaints’ favour”.
“The respondent clearly racially discriminated against people of colour, particularly as regards payment of wages,” the adjudicator wrote. He awarded €1,000 as compensation to Ajibola for a breach of the Employment Equality Act 1998.
There was also a “100 per cent failure” by BGSS to comply with the employment regulation order for the security trade, as it had paid Ajibola nothing for the 230 hours he worked between 30 July and 9 September 2024.
He awarded Ajibola €3,337.46 for the breach.
Further orders for breaches of the working time legislation brought the total award to Ajibola to €4,720.46.
McEntee also directed the payment of a Sunday premium on the hours worked at a rate to be agreed between the liquidator and the union.
Ajibola was previously awarded a little over €3,300 in February 2025 for non-payment of wages by BGS Security Ltd after appearing alone before the WRC in late 2024, met but with no success in having the tribunal’s decision enforced.
Orders for redress to dozens of ex-staff totalling nearly €240,000 have now been registered against BGSS – and its liquidator has advised the WRC it will have to draw on the Employers’ Insolvency Fund for these to be met.
Steven Gyurko, a representative of Thomas Musiol, the liquidator appointed to BGS Security Ltd on 10 November 2025 by the High Court, told the WRC at the hearing of Ajibola’s case that the officers of the company had “completely disappeared”.
Former BGSS director Hugh Downes had sold his home in Dublin in August 2025, Gyurko said. “We’re not even sure he is here in the country,” he said.
The liquidator had “full sympathy to these employees” and would “try to do everything to process their claim under the relevant payment scheme and arrange payment”, Musiol added.
Coleman had said there was “ambiguity” about whether the unpaid wages could be paid out from the Employers’ Insolvency Fund now the firm was in liquidation as some of the workers affected had no social welfare contributions.
