A NIGERIAN handball player for the Grammer School team was yesterday facing deportation after making a claim against his employers for allegedly failing to pay his wages and bonuses.
Monday Felix was arrested by immigration officials within days of filing a complaint at the labour court, according to his lawyer Yiannakis Erotokritou, and is now facing the possibility of deportation before his case has been investigated.
Erotokritou has written to the Labour Ministry and to the Ombudsman’s office concerning the case. Among his claims are “unfair termination” of his contract, non-payment of wages and non-payment of bonus payments for the European Handball Cup.
Erotokritou is fighting for Felix to remain in Cyprus until his dispute is heard at the labour court.
The lawyer said the immigration department had arrested him in an attempt to send him back to Nigeria. Felix had played all last season with the same team and returned to Cyprus earlier this year for the new season after reaching an oral agreement with management, but the new contract was never actually signed.
Nicos Mannouris, president of the school’s handball team, told the Cyprus Mail yesterday the contract had not been signed because Felix kept coming up with new demands and would not sign. He said that, in the end, management had decided not to go ahead and had terminated his employment.
Mannouris said that in May the school had agreed a salary with Felix and he came to Cyprus in August to begin training. “He then decided the salary wasn’t enough and refused to sign the contract. We renegotiated, got another high increase and supposedly everything was OK. Then before a serious match he came up with other demands like bonuses and all the time he was refusing to sign the contract so we had to put an end to it.”
Mannouris said that since Felix was without a contract, management had been able to terminate his services to the team. He said that they informed the authorities, because, according to the handball federation’s regulations, once a contract is broken, a foreign player cannot stay in Cyprus and play with another team.
“His case will be brought to the labour court and this may take months. Who is going to support him here? He can come back if he wants to. Is the government going to pay Monday to carry on his vacation in Cyprus? We paid him in advance and we paid everything according to the law,” Mannouris said.
“We have nothing to do with the laws and procedure of the aliens department. We informed them that of November 15 that he was no longer a player or employee. Whatever they do has nothing to do with the school.”
The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.
