United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellant	MISS K SAWYER (of Counsel) Instructed by: Mr R Anderson Anderson's Litigation Solicitors 871 High Road North Finchley London N12 8QA


 


JUDGE A WAKEFIELD

1. This is the ex parte preliminary hearing of an appeal by Mr George Nwokedi against a Decision of an Employment Tribunal sitting at Stratford by which his complaints of wrongful dismissal, breach of contract and race discrimination were dismissed. The Decision was promulgated on 20 February 2001, following a four day hearing in the previous October and a meeting of the Tribunal, in the absence of the parties, on 22 January.
2. At the outset of the appeal, Counsel for the Appellant - only recently instructed - sought and was granted permission to amend the Notice of Appeal to add two new grounds, as set out respectively in paragraphs 4 and 23 of her Skeleton Argument first seen by us today.
3. In the event, the second of these new grounds was abandoned in the course of argument, it being accepted that it was based on arguments as to the evidence which had not been mounted before the Employment Tribunal and therefore could not be taken before us.
4. The Appellant, through Counsel, has also abandoned the original three grounds of appeal set out in the Notice of Appeal. We are therefore left with one ground of appeal only. This, as set out in paragraph 4 of the Skeleton Argument is as follows, that:

" The tribunal erred in law in finding that the Appellant had committed a repudiatory breach of his contract, entitling the Respondents to terminate the contract summarily, in that he had breached the implied term of trust and confidence and/or was guilty of gross misconduct in circumstances where the tribunal did not find that he had been directly dishonest but had not disclosed certain information nor that he had breached any professional regulation."

It is argued in support of this ground that the Appellant was found by the Employment Tribunal to have been guilty merely of non-disclosure, but not of direct dishonesty and that the nature of the non-disclosure was not such as to constitute a breach of the implied term of mutual trust and confidence which must subsist between employer and employee. We were referred to the speech of Lord Nicholls of Birkenhead in the House of Lords in the case of Malik v BCCI [1998[ AC 20. We are satisfied that this ground of appeal has no merit.

5. The Employment Tribunal was dealing, as are we, with a situation involving a training contract between a firm of solicitors and a trainee solicitor. What the Appellant had failed to disclose was that he had accepted another training contract with another firm of solicitors to cover the same period, and had also accepted funding from that other firm for the legal practice course, prior to entering into or signing a training contract with the Respondent and accepting funding for that same course from them.
6. The Tribunal found that the evidence of the Appellant before them was:

"duplicitous, untruthful, and unreliable"

They also found, amongst other things, that in his dealings with the Respondent the Appellant had not been conducting himself with integrity and had attempted to deceive or mislead them. Those are findings in paragraph 56 of the Decision. There was also a finding that he had misled the Respondent at almost every available opportunity as his employment with it began (paragraph 58).

7. In those circumstances it is quite clear to us that the implied term of trust and confidence had been breached and there was a repudiatory breach of the contract of training. The conclusions of the Employment Tribunal on this matter cannot be impugned and this appeal is dismissed.