Hotel Group Receives £432,000 in Legal Costs
Alan Kitto
A question that we are regularly asked by clients faced with an Employment Tribunal claim is, will the claimant have to pay our legal costs in the event that we successfully defend their claim(s) or vice versa, will the employer have to pick up the claimant’s costs if they win.
Generally speaking, in Employment Tribunal claims, irrespective of the outcome, each side is responsible for paying their own legal costs; but there are exceptions, typically where one party acts unreasonably.
One such exception reported recently saw Millennium & Copthorne Hotels awarded a £425,000 cost award, which is believed to be the largest cost award made by an Employment Tribunal in the UK.
The award follows a case brought by Chee Hwee Tan in 2017 for unfair dismissal, age discrimination, race discrimination, sex discrimination, victimisation, harassment, whistleblowing detriment and unfair deduction from wages.
All claims were dismissed by the tribunal, which found Tan was ‘duplicitous’ and acted in a way that undermined the trust and confidence between himself and his employer.
Tan, former senior vice president of global procurement, left the hotel chain following a redundancy process that was deemed by the tribunal to be fair. He subsequently claimed he had been discriminated against and paid less than comparative colleagues because he is gay and of Chinese Singaporean ethnicity.
Had the tribunal not found the dismissal to have been fair, the Judge said the firm would have been justified in dismissing the claimant as soon as it discovered he had been making covert recordings of conversations with colleagues. The judgment said this behaviour had “undermined the trust and confidence between the parties”.
The size of the cost award reflected the lengths that Tan went to wrongly implicate his colleagues, which resulted in more than 3,000 pages of documents being brought before the tribunal.