NatWest Group Plc was ordered to pay an ex-compliance manager £88,000 ($112,440) after she was unfairly dismissed by the bank days after getting surgery for cancer.
(Bloomberg) — NatWest Group Plc was ordered to pay an ex-compliance manager £88,000 ($112,440) after she was unfairly dismissed by the bank days after getting surgery for cancer.
Adeline Willis, a former senior risk and compliance officer, was seeking as much as £4.3 million at a London employment tribunal after judges said she’d been discriminated against and unfairly fired from her £160,000-a-year job.
She was told she was losing her job via a 2020 text message two days after she had major surgery and less than a year after she’d been diagnosed with colon cancer.
The discrimination she suffered had a “profoundly damaging impact” upon her health and the experience has been “far, far worse than the impact of my cancer diagnosis and treatment,” she said in a witness statement for the trial.
The judges reduced the payout after they found that she was earning “significantly more” in a new job as a self-employed contractor than if she’d stayed at NatWest, according to a ruling published this week.
“We are sorry that there were things the bank did not get right and where we fell short of the standards our colleagues expect,” a NatWest spokesperson said. “We recognize the extremely difficult personal circumstances in this case and have taken steps to ensure this cannot happen again.”
Awards for unfair dismissal are usually capped at UK employment tribunals at £105,707 unless whistleblowing or discrimination are proved, then any award can be unlimited.
“I am pleased that the employment tribunal recognized the egregious, unlawful and aggravated nature of NatWest’s treatment of this hardworking and ambitious professional and at a time when she deserved the genuine support and sympathy from management,” Will Clayton, a lawyer representing Willis, said in a statement.
(Updates with a comment from Willis’s lawyer in the final paragraph)
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