A former NatWest bank employee has been awarded a record £4.7 million for unfair dismissal and disability discrimination, with the award recently confirmed in the Employment Appeal Tribunal. The claimant, known in the tribunal proceedings as “AB” worked for NatWest (subsequently Royal Bank of Scotland plc) from 2008 until her resignation in 2014. In August…
The status of professional partners in the context of employment law has exercised the courts on many occasions. Are they employees, workers, or employers or, in some cases, none of the above. Is there a difference between self-employed salaried partners and employed salaried partners? From an employment perspective, probably not. Of course, the employment rights available vary from none to most, depending on which type of employment status (if any) applies.
The same issue arises in the case of members of an LLP (or limited liability partnership), who are often referred to as partners. One such member was a solicitor who worked for Wilsons Solicitors LLP and whose claim was recently considered by the Court of Appeal.
Mr Wilson became a member of the LLP in May 2008. He held the post of managing partner, as well as being the firm’s COLP (Compliance Officer for Legal Practice) and COFA (Compliance Officer for Finance and Administration).
In July 2014 the board of the LLP received a complaint of bullying made against the senior partner, Mr Nisbet. Mr Wilson investigated the complaint, reported his findings to the board and produced a report on 7 October 2014. On 21 October the board was supposed to meet to discuss the report. However, a majority of the members refused to attend the meeting. Instead, the following month, they demanded that Mr Wilson should resign. They then voted to remove him from his post. They also removed him from the posts of COLP and COFA before he was able to submit his report.
In January 2015 Mr Wilson wrote to the other members and claimed that they had repudiated the terms of the members’ agreement by their actions and he accepted the repudiatory breaches. He gave one month’s notice of his intention to leave the membership of the LLP on the basis that their actions had made continued membership intolerable.
Embed from Getty ImagesOver the last few weeks the High Court has heard some astonishing evidence in the bitter wrongful dismissal claim brought by the former CEO of Signia, a wealth management company, as reported in The Independent.
High profile entrepreneur John Caudwell has frequently made the news over the last couple of decades. The founder of mobile phones retailer Phones 4U has presented himself as a forthright, no-nonsense style of businessman. According to the website Caudwell.com (owned, registered and administered by one John D Caudwell and which is currently “down for maintenance”) he is a “successful entrepreneur and philanthropist” who “built an immensely successful mobile telecoms company”.
Signia is a wealth management company that was jointly founded by Nathalie Dauriac and six of her Coutts Bank colleagues in 2010. Another co-founder was Mr Caudwell. The business focuses on high end wealth management. All appeared to be well until details emerged of an extraordinary dispute between Ms Dauriac and Mr Caudwell, ostensibly in connection with expenses claims amounting to some £33,000. Ms Dauriac claimed that the expenses investigation was unfair and was, in effect, trumped up to deprive her of her £12 million 49% stake in the business, which was bought out for a nominal £2.00 fee.
Giving evidence in the High Court trial Ms Dauriac says that when they set up the business in 2010, “Mr Caudwell had asked me…as a last minute condition of jointly setting up the business, to give an undertaking to him not to have children, a proposal I did not agree to”.
Ms Dauriac claimed in evidence that Mr Caudwell orchestrated an “elaborate conspiracy” against her, resulting in her claim of constructive dismissal.
For its part, Signia maintained that she wrongfully claimed the expenses, that her approach to them was “brazen” and that she was “guilty of gross misconduct”.
In his evidence, Mr Caudwell said that the breakdown of his business relationship with Ms Dauriac, who he considered to be a “best friend” was like suffering a “bereavement”:
As I have pointed out over many years. pursuing a claim for constructive unfair dismissal can be a risky course of action because, for the former employee, it brings with it the added burden of having to demonstrate that the employer’s conduct was so unsatisfactory that it established a fundamental breach of a term of…
Zena Dickenson worked for 21 years at Easington Lane Primary School. From 2009 she was employed as the School Business Manager. She was responsible for a £1.2 million budget and she had 15 employees reporting directly to her. In 2015 it became apparent that there would be an overspend and reduced income for reasons including…
Many employers will by now be familiar with the ACAS Early Conciliation (EC) process which was initially introduced in April 2014. The concept of Early Conciliation is that ACAS will attempt to resolve any potential claim before it is formally submitted to an Employment Tribunal – indeed it is now the case that claims must…
As you may be aware constructive dismissal occurs when an employee terminates their employment in response to their employee’s treatment of them. The employee has to show that they have resigned in response to fundamental breach of contract by the employer. The Employment Rights Act essentially say that if the employee terminates their contract in…
In the case of Gibbs v Leeds United Football Club Ltd [2016] EWHC 960 (QB) (28 April 2016) the matter in question concerned a contract of employment between the Claimant (Mr Gibbs) and the Respondent (Leeds United FC). The question was whether the Claimant had been constructively dismissed due to a repudiatory breach of…
In Frith Accountants Limited v Mrs J Law the relatively narrow questions for the Employment Appeal Tribunal were whether someone who has been constructively dismissed can be held to have contributed to that dismissal, whether the basic award should have been adjusted to take into account the employee’s conduct and whether the assessment at 40%…
In Blackburn v Aldi Stores Ltd the Employment Appeal Tribunal looked at whether a failure to provide an adequate appeal in a grievance procedure could amount to a breach of mutual trust and confidence and thus a constructive dismissal, and concluded that it could. Mr David Blackburn commenced work with Aldi in 2006 as a…