United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellants	MR OLDHAM (Of Counsel) Under ELAAS
For the Respondent


 


JUDGE C SMITH: In the judgment of this Employment Appeal Tribunal there appear to be good reasons for the Tribunal's decision not to award costs, namely the fact that it was not all clear until the hearing whether the employers were still relying upon the reason of theft for the dismissal. That was only abandoned, in effect, during the hearing and so, on the face of it, the employers stood the risk of losing the case on the basis that had the Tribunal concluded that the principal reason was the theft, the Tribunal would have held that the procedure was defective and the dismissal unfair.

On the face of it there appeared to be good reasons for the Chairman exercising his discretion not to award costs. However it has been said to us today, emphatically, that the Applicant produced deliberately fraudulent documents before the Industrial Tribunal, documents which were exposed as being fraudulent, and we do accept that if that is the case then it may be arguable that that is a factor which the Industrial Tribunal should have taken into account when exercising its overall discretion with regard to the question of whether they felt the Applicant had acted vexatiously, abusively or otherwise unreasonably within rule 12.

We are prepared to allow the matter to go through to a full hearing but we certainly think there ought to be directions, which we will discuss with Mr Oldham, to try and make sure that the full Employment Appeal Tribunal have a complete picture before them as to what took place before the Industrial Tribunal and unfortunately it looks as though we are going to have to give a direction with regard to the production of the notes of evidence. So we will hear Mr Oldham on that.