By Conor Gogarty

Copyright walesonline

A food delivery website must pay more than £60,000 in compensation to a former employee who was unfairly sacked for working abroad remotely. Tanveer Shah lives in the Vale of Glamorgan but he was based in Egypt for a period of his time as a sales boss for Stoke-based Foodhub. Foodhub, which offers takeaways from more than 30,000 UK restaurants, hired Mr Shah as a field sales executive in 2018. As a high performer he rose through the ranks “rapidly”, earning a promotion first to regional field account manager and then to UK field sales manager, Judge David Maxwell told an employment tribunal. In August 2022 Foodhub chief executive Ardian Mula noticed something “unexpected” in the records of Mr Shah, whose expenses were “far lower” than the rest of his team. Given that Mr Shah had a national role “the opposite pattern” would have been expected, the tribunal heard. Don’t miss a court report by signing up to our crime newsletter here According to Mr Mula, the expenses data showed Mr Shah had only travelled away from home on six or seven occasions in the previous three months. In a meeting, the chief executive asked Mr Shah how many days out of the last 60 he had been in the field. Mr Shah did not answer but instead argued he did not need to be in the field to do his job. Mr Mula disagreed, pointing to poor sales figures for Mr Shah’s team and accusing him of “stealing money from the company” and “illegitimately taking a salary”. He dismissed the employee on the spot. In the employment tribunal Mr Shah accepted he had been told to spend four to five days each week in the field although he said this was a change in his role and he felt there had not been a “proper process” in managing the change. Mr Shah said he had been in Egypt on holiday and contracted Covid-19 which meant he had been unable to fly back to the UK so spent some time working remotely. He could not say whether he had been in Egypt for days, a week or several weeks, at the end of 2021 and beginning of 2022. The judge described this as a “surprising gap” in his memory. After Mr Shah was dismissed he was allowed to appeal and an investigation was carried out. He attended two interviews where he was given an opportunity to comment on the evidence. Following a disciplinary hearing with a manager, the dismissal was upheld. But Judge Maxwell said these steps were only taken to give “the superficial appearance of fairness”, adding: “Our finding is that this was a process orchestrated by [Foodhub’s senior HR business partner James Page] to achieve the outcome already decided upon by Mr Mula, namely dismissal. “We find that Mr Page was only looking for evidence which supported the alleged misconduct and went against the claimant. The clearest example of this is the information obtained with respect to fuel expenses [which, due to missing entries, did not fully show how often Mr Shah had been in the field]. “Had Mr Page investigated the position with fuel card expenses in a full and fair way, contacting the fuel card company and requesting duplicates where necessary, he would have found all of the relevant transactions on the first occasion. “Mr Page did not do this. Instead he produced an unreliable and incomplete spreadsheet.” Judge Maxwell awarded compensation of £61,419 after hearing evidence of a “deterioration” in Mr Shah’s mental health as a result of his “prolonged period of unemployment and financial situation” following his sacking. Foodhub was founded in 2008 by Mr Mula and his friend Mohammed Shakil. The firm has more than 1,000 employees and operates in the UK, US, Australia and New Zealand. If you would like to speak to WalesOnline about a story we should be investigating, email us at conor.gogarty@walesonline.co.uk