(1) Mr M Canton Jara (2) Alejandro Rodriguez v Trustportal Solutions Limited and 3 others — 2025

The claimants, who had been employed by Trustportal Solutions Limited from 1 July 2021, were given notice of dismissal for alleged redundancy on 14 August 2025, with termination due on 14 November 2025. They applied for interim relief on 20 August 2025, saying they had made a protected disclosure on 8 August 2025 about tax fraud, financial impropriety and unlawful employment practices, and that the redundancy process was a sham used after that disclosure. The respondents said the company had been in financial difficulty, that redundancy planning had begun before the alleged disclosure, and that the claimants had been offered a secondment.

The tribunal heard the application without oral evidence and treated the material before it as untested. It said it could not resolve on an interim basis whether there had been a redundancy situation, whether redundancy documents had been created retrospectively, or whether the real reason for dismissal was the alleged protected disclosure. It rejected the respondents' jurisdiction argument that the case should be treated as a s.105 ERA 1996 redundancy-selection claim, noting that the claimants had not pleaded that route and were disputing that any redundancy situation existed.

Applying s.128 ERA 1996, s.103A ERA 1996 and the higher interim-relief threshold described in Taplin v Shipman, and referring to Parsons v Airplus International Limited as an example of issues that cannot be resolved at this stage, the tribunal held that the claimants had not shown a pretty good chance of succeeding in proving that the principal reason for dismissal was the alleged protected disclosure. The application for interim relief therefore failed, and the reasons record no final liability determination on the underlying claims.