‘Misogynistic’ HR practitioner accused of sexual harassment loses legal battle
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A senior HR practitioner will be thousands of dollars out of pocket for pursuing his unfair dismissal bid in the Federal Court.
Ex-Stantec Australia senior HR business partner Firas Raghib has lost his unfair dismissal fight at every turn, with the Federal Court now ordering him to he pay his former employer $45,000 in legal costs.
In August, the Fair Work Commission (FWC) said Stantec was not in the wrong when it dismissed Raghib for serious misconduct, including for contacting a woman who alleged Raghib engaged in inappropriate conversation and physical touching at the 2023 Christmas party.
Raghib was also found to have doctored a text message to look as if a separate complainant was admitting to making a false complaint.
FWC deputy president Ian Masson said the text message was “a cynical fabrication” designed to undermine the complainant, the allegations and Stantec’s disciplinary process.
In those initial proceedings, Raghib claimed Stantec was “more concerned with making gender-based rather than merit-based selections”, despite there being no evidence to back him up.
“His criticism of other named females in his material, employees who had nothing to do with this proceeding, was disgraceful and reflects poorly on him given the role he occupied with the respondent and his claimed experience as a senior HR practitioner,” Masson said.
“The applicant’s views, as previously observed, appear misogynistic.”
Raghib lost an appeal before the commission’s full bench.
He then advanced five grounds of appeal before the Federal Court, which were observed to be lengthy and, at times, “incoherent”.
Those grounds included jurisdictional error, failure to perform the mandatory evaluative task, procedural unfairness, and lack of merit.
In a costs decision, Justice Michael Wheelahan said that due to the state of Raghib’s case, many of his grounds were bound to fail, either because they raised matters not put to the commission, or a lack of correspondence between his submissions in the court.
“For the above reasons … this proceeding was always doomed to fail because it lacked merit, and I am comfortably satisfied that the applicant instituted the proceeding without reasonable cause,” Justice Wheelahan said.
Stantec originally quantified its solicitor and own client costs in the sum of $112,460.37, but there were several internal inconsistencies in the calculations. Justice Wheelahan also considered the costs quantified on Stantec’s behalf to be “on the high side”.
Stantec claimed party and party costs in the sum of $56,230, which Justice Wheelahan again reduced to a $45,000 lump sum.
Citation: Raghib v Stantec Australia (Costs) [2026] FCA 1415.
RELATED TERMS
Harassment is defined as persistent behaviour or acts that intimidate, threaten, or uncomfortably affect other employees at work. Because of anti-discrimination laws and the Fair Work Act of 2009, harassment in Australia is prohibited on the basis of protected characteristics.
Sexual harassment is characterised as persistent, frequent, and unwanted sexual approaches or behaviour of a sexual nature at work. Sexually harassing another person in a setting that involves education, employment, or the provision of goods or services is prohibited under the law.
When a company terminates an employee's job for improper or illegitimate reasons, it is known as an unfair dismissal.
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