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Staff Reporter
February 13, 2023
Sacked account director wins unfair dismissal claim
Unified comms and mobile services convergence provider Tango Networks must pay an ex-account director a total of £71,441 in damages and compensation for unfair dismissal
Mark Jones (61) won his Industrial Tribunal cases against Tango Networks and is to receive a basic award (£1,614), a compensatory award (£27,193.05) , compensation for breach of contract (£1,578.52), injury to feelings (£20,000), interest on injury to feelings award (£3,295,45), grossing up for tax payable on the award (£17,869,34).
Jones worked for Tango for two years from January 2019 as a channel account director with three main clients (Telco Switch, AVC1 and Redcentric). Had he sold 13,000 SIMs he would have earned £40,000 commission. But he did not earn any commission during his time with Tango
Tribunal heard Jones had not sold enough SIMs to make any commission and was poor at forecasting how many SIM sales a partner seller would make. There was a lack of structured account planning and evidence of day-to -day business.
Tango wanted to appoint another salesperson and located a middle-aged candidate through LinkedIn. The Tribunal heard manager Philip Hesketh “wanted someone younger for the role” and “who was ideally female”.
Hesketh told colleagues he had two new candidates and wanted to make an offer to each “on the provision we move Mark on very early in Jan 2021”
Hesketh said in evidence:
‘A lot of the candidates we were interviewing were a mirror image of me, white middle-aged men and that it was a shame that we did not attract more diversity into the application process”.
The Tribunal heard that Hesketh told colleagues he didn’t want a team of ’50 odd year old balding men and ideally a woman’.
The Tribunal, led by Employment Judge Miller, concluded
“We find that there was a firm plan to dismiss the claimant and to replace him with another candidate. The respondent planned to do this before the claimant had two year’s service so they could do it quickly”.