A SUPERVISOR in the VIP section of a popular Dublin nightclub was dismissed during a five-minute conversation after her manager accused her of stealing €49 from the till, an employment appeals tribunal has heard.
Gabriella Varga (35), from Hungary, was giving evidence in the last day of her claim for unfair dismissal against Pod Entertainment.
She was employed by Pod from October 2006 until January 2009 as a bartender, and later as a bar supervisor.
The tribunal heard she had been working alone in the VIP bar in the Tripod nightclub on the night of January 30th/31st, 2009 until shortly after midnight, when another bartender was sent to help her as she was five months pregnant.
“I would tire easily. Vega came along. She was there to the end of the night.”
Before Ms Hue joined her, Ms Varga said she had had regular customers who tipped her “generously”. She kept her tips in a glass beside the till.
It was “common practice”, she continued, when the till was running low on coins to swap the coins in the tip-jar for notes in the till. On the night in question she said she emptied her tips on to a silver tray, counted them, put them in the till and took out €35 for her tip jar.
Rama Reddy, her supervisor, gave evidence that he saw Ms Varga taking €40 from the till and that the coins she put in did not amount to €40. He went to the club manager, Louise Monaghan, and told her what he saw. He did not, however, count the coins or the notes.
Ms Varga also told of an incident where a customer tried to pay for drinks with a Laser card, but as the card machine did not work, the customer left to get cash at an ATM.
The customer did not return and Ms Varga said she later rang the order in as an over-ring , and also hand-wrote a note about it.
At the end of her shift she was asked to follow Ms Monaghan into the office to explain a shortfall in the till. “She said it looked bad and it looked like I took the money. I was shocked.”
She was not shown the end-of-night read from the register or the money being counted. Nor was a stock-count carried out. No one else was at the meeting, which she said lasted five minutes, and she was dismissed.
Clíona Kimber BL, for Pod, said the meeting lasted 15 minutes, and she did not accept Ms Varga’s account of her counting her tips or that the credit card incident happened at all.
