In Person For the v Mr Millar (Managing Director of Respondent) — 2025

The unfair dismissal claim was dismissed because the claimant did not have the requisite length of service. The judgment records that the parties accepted he had not been summarily dismissed and that he was entitled to two weeks' notice, but the tribunal did not determine the unfair dismissal claim on the merits.

The tribunal found that the claimant's remuneration package was not a genuine salary-plus-dividends arrangement. It relied on pre-employment emails referring to £55,000 salary and £45,000 labelled as dividends, but found that no shares were ever transferred, there was no evidence that the payments came from Fastrax Conveyors Limited, and the monthly 'dividend element' was paid by the respondent in the same way as the PAYE element. The post-termination attempt to reframe the payments through invoices was treated as an artificial accountancy exercise.

On that basis, the tribunal held that the April 2024 non-payment of £3,750 was an unlawful deduction from wages under section 13 of the Employment Rights Act 1996. It also held that the dividend element had to be included when calculating the claimant's two weeks' notice pay, and awarded £1,750 gross for that claim. Separately, the respondent breached section 1 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 by failing to provide written particulars of employment, and the tribunal set the award at the maximum of four weeks' wages, totalling £11,230.76 gross.