A snooker club will not have its licence revoked after its manager assaulted a customer outside the premises earlier this year. Greenwich Council’s Licensing Review Sub Committee decided not to grant a police request to revoke the licence of Woolwich Snooker Club when it met on May 27. It instead chose to suspend its licence for six weeks.
PC Mindaugas Alsauskas for and on behalf of Metropolitan Police applied to Greenwich Council to have the club’s premises licence revoked following an incident involving the business’ director and premises licence holder Tacim Yavuz earlier this year.
The committee heard on February 2 at around 12.30am, Mr Yavuz punched one of his customers in the face before chasing a member of the public and kicking him in the legs outside the club in Hare Street.
The punch came about after he intervened when two men left the snooker club fighting each other. Mr Yavuz was arrested and admitted to the assault, and was later released pending investigation with the case being subsequently closed without further action.
CCTV footage showing the February 2 incident was shown at the committee meeting, in which Mr Yavuz “can be seen to punch a member of the public seemingly unprompted, and then kick another individual". Police argued that this footage showed Mr Yavuz was not a responsible Premises Licence Holder, and that he “escalated the situation rather than deescalating it”.
Police also claimed that the only reason the matter resulted in no further action was “the victim’s unwillingness to cooperate” and that Mr Yavuz “had no concern for the welfare of the man he punched who was apparently unconscious”. Mr Yavuz’s legal representative Mr Dadds submitted that the police should not have accused Mr Yavuz of a crime in the committee meeting as they had concluded their investigation and made the decision to take no further action.
He also "emphasised that the principle of innocent until proven guilty is of critical importance" and claimed that there were no findings of fact against Mr Yavuz. Mr Dadds said that the incident began because three individuals who weren’t members of the club wanted to come in and were asked to leave, and Mr Yavuz was threatened with a knife so the punch was in self defence.
He also claimed that Mr Yavuz called 999 when the altercation between the men began, a fact that was confirmed by police. When deciding whether to revoke Woolwich Snooker Club’s licence, the sub committee found the police’s concerns to be “serious and instructive", considered Mr Yavuz’ actions to represent “violent behaviour" and found it important that “the force of the punch was such that it appeared to render a member of the public unconscious”.
Considering this, the sub committee determined that instead of revoking the licence, it was more appropriate to remove Mr Yavuz as the designated premises supervisor and suspend the premises licence for six weeks. As well as this, the licence was also altered so that staff at the snooker club must be trained in the operation of CCTV and any footage must be provided to police or the council at their request.
This licence alteration was put into place because police had trouble retrieving CCTV footage from the night in question when they requested Mr Yavuz to hand it over. The CCTV footage shown at the meeting was from a different premises, and Mr Yavuz never provided footage captured by the snooker club’s cameras. Mr Dadds claimed that a “substantial sum” was spent trying to recover the footage, but it was still not downloadable.
Got a story? email cameron.blackshaw@reachplc.com
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