At­tor­ney Michael Quam­i­na has de­nied ever ad­vis­ing for­mer Min­is­ter of Sport Dar­ryl Smith on any­thing to do with al­le­ga­tions of sex­u­al ha­rass­ment against the Min­is­ter.

In an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia, Quam­i­na said: “I nev­er ad­vised Mr Smith on any­thing to do with sex­u­al ha­rass­ment. In fact I was not hired by the for­mer Min­is­ter and my on­ly in­ter­ac­tion with him was to take in­struc­tions from him in re­la­tion to the dis­missal of Miss More­au.”

Quam­i­na in­sist­ed he was re­tained by the Min­istry of Sport and not Smith to deal with the claim of wrong­ful dis­missal against the Min­istry by More­au.

“The claim was for wrong­ful dis­missal against the Min­istry. How could Mr Smith re­tain me? He was not the sub­ject of the ac­tion. It was the Min­istry who had fired Miss More­au,” Quam­i­na ex­plained.

He rub­bished claims by the com­mit­tee set up to in­ves­ti­gate the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing the fir­ing of More­au and sub­se­quent pay­ment of $150,000 as a set­tle­ment, that he, Quam­i­na, was in­volved in the is­sue well be­fore it reached the stage of set­tle­ment.

The com­mit­tee had con­clud­ed: “We do not ac­cept that the for­mer Min­is­ter made no men­tion to Mr Quam­i­na when he so­licit­ed Mr Quam­i­na’s as­sis­tance that al­le­ga­tions of sex­u­al ha­rass­ment had been made against him by Miss More­au.”

Quam­i­na said the com­mit­tee’s find­ings of him were “en­tire­ly in­ac­cu­rate and with­out sub­stance” and he was not al­lowed to re­spond to the ad­verse find­ings be­fore they were con­clud­ed as is de­mand­ed by law. The At­tor­ney said his on­ly in­volve­ment was in deal­ing with two mat­ters. The first was whether the dis­missal was wrong in law and if so, what would be a rea­son­able set­tle­ment?

“I have done this for a long time, for en­er­gy sec­tor com­pa­nies, busi­ness sec­tor, Trade Unions and gov­ern­ment min­istries and when I looked at the facts I con­clud­ed that Miss More­au was wrong­ful­ly dis­missed and that a more rea­son­able set­tle­ment than what was be­ing sought by the union should ap­ply. There is a le­gal opin­ion to sup­port what I am say­ing,” Quam­i­na told Guardian Me­dia.

He added that when the Min­istry brought him in, a Trade dis­pute had al­ready been filed, and was at the stage of con­cil­i­a­tion at the Min­istry of Labour.

More­au had al­leged sex­u­al ha­rass­ment as the rea­son for her dis­missal as Smith’s per­son­al as­sis­tant and the mat­ter was even­tu­al­ly set­tled with a non-dis­clo­sure clause at­tached to the set­tle­ment.