The Court ruled the cost of the proceedings against SOS and ordered it to pay Mr. Allieu his lost wages.
Monrovia The National Labor Court in a recent judgement ruled against SOS Children Villages Liberia for wrongful dismissal and unfair labor practices meted out against its former National Director, Augustine A. Allieu.
The Court ruled the cost of the proceedings against SOS and ordered it to pay Mr. Allieu his lost wages.
The case landed on the docket of the National Labor Court via a Petition for judicial review filed by SOS after the Division of Labor Standards of the Ministry of Labor found in July 2024 that SOS had wrongfully dismissed Mr. Allieu.
It can be recalled that the Ministry’s ruling adjudged SOS liable and ordered them to unconditionally reinstate Mr. Allieu and to pay his lost wages in addition to all other benefits contained in his employment contract.
The National Labor Court, in its ruling, upheld the Ministry’s finding that SOS Liberia had failed to implement a fair internal investigation as required by law before its final decision to dismiss Mr. Allieu.
In early 2022, Augustine Allieu found himself facing rape accusation from a minor child in the care of SOS Liberia. The female adolescent, through the SOS interim leadership, accused him of sexual involvement with her that resulted in her pregnancy.
A four-month police investigation established that the rape allegation was false. The investigation found that Mr. Allieu was not even in Liberia when the alleged rape occurred and a subsequent DNA test showed that he was not the father of the minor’s child. Another DNA test done on the child of the minor found Wayne McIntosh, a former staff member at the SOS Buchanan office, to be the father of the minor’s child. Wayne McIntosh was subsequently arrested and charged with statutory rape, kept in prison without trial for over a year and is now at liberty with no interest from either SOS of the Ministry of Justice in pursuing the rape charge against him.
In 2022, Augustine Allieu had accused elements within the SOS Regional Office in Dakar, Senegal, of a regime change plot for SOS Liberia against him and a plan to francophonize SOS WCNA region as he was the last English-speaking national director, which he claimed was done through audit manipulation, framing him and through fake internal investigation with cooked-up results and use of a minor to plant false rape accusation on him.
Augustine Allieu is a Sierra Leonean national, expatriate and career development professional in the international development sector in the sub-region, having served in leadership posts at several international NGOs in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Senegal. Before taking the helm at SOS Children’s Villages Liberia in July 2017, he served as Head of Programme Strategy at Plan International, West and Central Africa Region. Before that, he served as Country Director at Plan International Sierra Leone and Country Director at Plan International Liberia in succession. Before that, he served as Head of Programs at the Catholic Relief Services Liberia Program.
