A TRIAL pitting the former chief executive of the Channel Islands Coop against his former employer started in the Royal Court yesterday.
Colin Sinclair Macleod joined the Coop at the age of 20 and worked his way up until he reached the very top rank, the court heard.
But he alleges that from 2017 onwards, members of the Coop’s board started to conspire to get rid of him, leading to him being off sick with work-related stress and eventually leaving the company in 2019. The Coop strongly denies the claim.
Mr Macleod has already settled the employment case in the Employment Tribunal, and is now making a claim against the organisation for personal injury.
Advocate Michael O’Connell, representing Mr Macleod, said: “The strapline of the society is ‘Belonging is everything’. That was established by Mr Macleod during his tenure as chief executive of the society.
“Mr Macleod belonged to the Coop… His case is that he reasonably expected to belong to the Coop to his contractual retirement at the age of 67.
“But after 30 years of devoted service to the Coop, and aged only 50, his employment was terminated.”
Advocate O’Connell described a campaign that started with the arrival of non-executive director Jennifer Carnegie to the board.
In one meeting, she is alleged to have “shouted and threatened Mr MacLeod with the loss of his job”.
As a result, he was diagnosed “with suffering from a serious psychological injury which has resulted in his inability to work”, Advocate O’Connell said.
The four directors “reached this secret agreement because they had decided that Mr MacLeod had to go”, he alleged.
“His face did not fit.”
He claimed the agreement was done “in an unlawful way” and in breach of their duty of care towards Mr MacLeod.
“Their communication was continuous, corrosive and covert.”
After he was diagnosed in May 2019, Mr MacLeod was off sick from 29 May 2019. He claims that he was then cut off from the company and his email address blocked.
Advocate Jeremy Heywood, representing the Channel Islands Co-operative Society, strongly denied that there had ever been a secret agreement to oust Mr MacLeod.
“It just doesn’t make sense,” he said.
Rather, he said, there were serious concerns about the Coop’s finances, which had been highlighted in a critical report by KPMG.
“The auditors told the board that this meant that the society was technically unable to meet its liabilities,” the advocate said.
The Coop’s finances are now in order, the court heard.
Advocate Heywood added that there was no evidence of a psychiatric condition, adding that stress isn’t a psychiatric condition. Further, he argued that Mr MacLeod had made a full recovery and was deemed fit to return to his role.
Preparation for the case included the disclosure of two million documents, and searches on company servers as well as some private devices, and WhatsApp messages are expected to play a significant part in the trial.
Advocate O’Connell said that some messages had been deleted and that others weren’t initially disclosed. Advocate Heywood said this wasn’t true.
“There is no evidence, however much noise Mr MacLeod is making now, of any sort of deliberate destruction of documents. He has looked for evidence, he cannot find it and now, he wants to use an absence of evidence to support his theory of a conspiracy.”
Commissioner Matthew John Thompson is presiding. Jurats Le Cornu and Powell are sitting.
The trial continues.
