United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellant	THE APPELLANT In Person


 


JUDGE REID QC

1. This is the Preliminary Hearing of an appeal by Mr Guilfoy against a refusal by the Employment Tribunal to review a decision which was made back in January 2000. The decision refusing the review was sent to the parties on 6 January 2003. The Tribunal, I should say, was the Tribunal sitting at Manchester.
2. Mr Guilfoy had brought proceedings against his former employers, Seal Semiconductors Ltd, asserting that he was constructively dismissed. Those proceedings failed and a lengthy judgment was sent to the parties on 19 January 2000 after the hearing over 4 days in 1999. Thereafter, he made a variety of enquiries and came across what he regarded as being documents which should have been before the Tribunal at the previous stage. It was on the basis of those documents that he applied for a review. The Chairman who considered the review said this:

"I have read the various documents which the applicant enclosed with his letter. I am satisfied that if these documents had been before the Tribunal in 1999 it would not have caused the Tribunal to have reached a different decision than it did. Insofar as the documents have any relevance at all I consider that at best they have only marginal relevance to the issues that were before the Tribunal.

Clearly there must be finality in litigation. I do not consider that the interests of justice require that a case that was fully and properly heard should now be re-opened. Therefore I refuse the application for a review on the grounds that it has no reasonable prospects of success."

3. Mr Guilfoy has not produced to us any convincing point of law which arises out of that decision. He has sought to address us at considerable length on the facts, largely I should say, facts which do not appear to have been in issue when the case was previously heard. Unfortunately for him this Tribunal is concerned only with issues of law. It is not a Tribunal which determines issues of fact. For him to succeed on his application for a reversal of the refusal to review it would have been necessary for him to show that the Chairman was in error in law in making the decision which he did. That he has been completely unable to do. I should say briefly in relation to the facts as he sought to open them to us that there do appear to have been discrepancies between, and inadequacies in the record keeping of, his former employers in their personnel files as a result of which his status was misdescribed in first of all a business purchase agreement in February 1998 and secondly (by reference to that) in an agreement for a sale and purchase of the issued shared capital of his employer in July 1998.
4. Those discrepancies do not in our judgement affect in any way what his employment was nor did the fact that in a document to which he was not a party his employment was misdescribed had any effect on what his contract of employment was. It seems to us therefore that not only is there no basis on which Mr Guilfoy can properly say that there is an issue of law which would go to a further appeal but that so far as the facts are concerned the decision of the Chairman was correct and inevitable. In those circumstances the appeal will be dismissed at this stage.