Mr Sandor Pal v Tech Mahindra Limited — 2024

At a preliminary hearing on 27 August 2024, Employment Judge McDonald sitting alone considered the respondent's applications to strike out the claimant's complaints and the claimant's application to amend to add victimisation under s.27 Equality Act 2010. The amendment application was refused. The remaining live complaints were an automatically unfair dismissal complaint connected with a request for paternity leave, and two unlawful deduction from wages complaints.

On the paternity-leave dismissal complaint, the tribunal held that the claimant's case was not totally and inexplicably inconsistent with the contemporaneous documents. The AMS and PACE search results were not conclusive, the respondent's paternity policy did not on its face require a MATB1 as a pre-condition to leave being granted, and the tribunal could not decide on the papers that the dismissing manager knew of the request. The strike-out application therefore failed, but the judge made a deposit order because the complaint was regarded as very borderline.

On the commission deductions complaint, the tribunal had very little information about how the commission scheme worked, what the claimant had been paid, or what he said should have been paid. That was partly because the claimant had not complied with the earlier direction to provide a breakdown, and partly because the bundle did not include the contract of employment or payslips. Even so, the tribunal refused strike out under both rule 37(1)(a) and rule 37(1)(c), held that a fair hearing was still possible if the information was supplied before witness statements, and made an unless order requiring the claimant to provide the breakdown and the respondent to provide payslips.

On the October 2023 pay deduction complaint, the respondent accepted that £2,275 had been deducted from the claimant's final pay, said the correct deduction should have been £1,604.98, and said it had repaid £210.87 in January 2024 after spotting the error. The tribunal refused strike out, made a deposit order, and recorded that no substantive remedy was being determined in this preliminary decision.