The Caen Vikings handball club would have abusively dismissed its former coach Dragan Mihailovic : this is what the industrial tribunal decided on November 4, 2021, a decision then communicated in mid-December to the parties concerned. Caen Handball dismissed Dragan Mihailovic in April 2018 for serious misconduct and accused him of moral and sexual harassment to a club worker and several other employees.
The industrial tribunal has therefore investigated and heard about fifteen witnesses (the survey had to be suspended due to the health crisis). Verdict of the prud’hommes: the harassment was not held against the former coach, the facts not being characterized. The prud’hommes also noted that the club had already started looking for a new coach, even before the dismissal of Dragan Mihailovic.
The Caen Handball club will appeal
Caen Handball will therefore having to pay him nearly 70,000 euros. But management has already planned to appeal. “Even if they are condemned for the moment, the leaders of the club do not regret their decision to have dismissed their then coach, because they have taken their responsibilities“, explains Me Aurélie Lefebvre, lawyer for Caen Handball. She specifies that one of the club’s speakers who denounced acts of sexual harassment saw this judgment very hard.
Caen Handball president Thomas Lamora defends his decision to fire the coach : “_I heard, on several occasions, of acts of moral harassment concerning Dragan Mihailovic, several employees and volunteers who told me that they came to work with the ball in their stomachs, and it was then that a speaker from the club came to see me and described to me behaviors that we considered intolerable. The message that this court decision sends is ‘When you preside over a club and such facts come up, you have to close your eyes‘, but we refused to do so.”_
The former coach, who works today with the handball club of Dreux-Vernouillet in the Eure, he says to himself “relievedof this decision.
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