Here’s a slightly unusual employment tribunal case.
Tim Wheeler, formerly the £780k a year CEO of property firm Brixton, is suing his former employer for breach of contract and unfair dismissal after being sacked last March. A number of allegations and, according the Evening Standard, quite a lot of foul language, have kept up the media interest in the case.
All entertaining stuff but the most interesting thing about this case is that it has come about because a chief executive was sacked. Chief executives are hardly ever sacked. OK, the headlines might say that a CEO has been fired but they are not dismissed in the way that most ordinary mortals would understand the term. In almost all cases, regardless of their poor performance or misconduct, they are paid vast sums of money to leave the company. But Tim Wheeler appears to have been given the boot with no golden parachute, no redundancy pay and no pay in lieu of notice.
Of course, I have no idea whether the allegations against Mr Wheeler are true or whether Brixton followed a fair procedure when they sacked him. We will have to wait for the judgement in April to find out what really happened. All the same, it is refreshing to see a board take the highly unusual step of dismissing their CEO when they think he has screwed up. It would be good to see a lot more of this in both the private and public sectors.
The only thing I can suggest is that he must have lost them a lot of money and they couldn’t afford to pay him