How my 10-year battle with Britain’s biggest arms maker destroyed my life
Her £360,000 payout over one sexist comment caused outrage. But read Marion’s side of the story and you may see things differently ...
EMBROILED in the latest round of her sex discrimination battle with Britain’s largest arms manufacturer, Marion Konczak cut a frail figure at the Court of Appeal in London last week. BAE Systems has described the £360,000 it has been ordered to pay the 63-year-old former secretary from Blackburn, Lancashire, as an ‘affront to justice’ and are appealing against it. And many will sympathise with them, given that the eye-watering sum was awarded for a single comment made to Mrs Konczak by a manager that ‘ women take things more emotionally than men while men tend to forget things and move on’.
But a Mail investigation has discovered that beneath the surface of this protracted ten-year legal battle — and Mrs Konczak’s subsequent successful case of disability discrimination, victimisation and automatic unfair dismissal — lies a highly disturbing story and one that goes to the heart of BAE’s controversial relationship with one of its most lucrative clients, Saudi Arabia.
For while Mrs Konczak’s financial award may have ultimately been made because of that ‘last straw’ remark about ‘ emotional’ women, the breakdown of her relationship with the defence giant began 12 years ago when the then 50- year- old mother-of-two was groped by a Royal Saudi Air Force warrant officer, one of several Saudis based at BAE’s plant in Samlesbury, Lancashire.
Mrs Konczak, then a £25,000-a-year secretary helping the Saudi officers seconded to BAE find rental homes, complained to her line manager after the warrant officer placed his hands on her breasts and tried to kiss her. But, despite her reporting the incident, nothing was done.
Instead she found herself coldshouldered by other Saudi officers in the Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF) Liaison Team office, where she was the only woman, and by BAE personnel who refused to take action against the officer.
Finally, at the request of the Saudis, she was removed from her post without warning in 2007 and transferred to one of BAE’s other sites.
‘I was removed from my job in less than 24 hours,’ says Mrs Konczak, speaking from the small bungalow in the Lancashire village of Langho, where she lives with her 65-year-old husband, John.
Having suffered a psychiatric breakdown because of the case, she shakes and stammers when she recalls her time at BAE, is on high doses of anti- depressants and is undergoing counselling with NHS psychologists.
SHE frequently spends days without getting dressed and struggles to leave the house alone. Her GP has described her condition as ‘ one of the most severe and persistent presentations of anxiety and depression that I have ever come across’.
According to Mrs Konczak: ‘In the eyes of BAE, the Saudis were always going to be more important than a lowly-paid secretary from Lancashire.’ Indeed, the case reveals the extent to which BAE Systems was determined to keep its biggest customer, after the Ministry of Defence and the U.S., happy.
As one member of BAE’s human resources department argued during an earlier tribunal hearing, Mrs Konczak’s removal from her post was justified because RSAF is an important customer, accounting for more than a fifth of its revenue.
‘If they say it happens, we run with that decision,’ said HR manager John Gray. ‘If they say “jump”, we jump.’ Mrs Konczak’s revelations will come as a huge embarrassment to BAE at a time when the company, along with the UK Government, has embarked upon a new multibillion-pound deal to provide support and training as part of a fiveyear Saudi British Defence Co-operation Programme.
The latest round of this protracted ‘David and Goliath’ legal battle has coincided with Theresa May’s visit last week to Saudi to discuss a £1.6 trillion oil company share deal and to meet King Salman.
The UK has been one of the biggest suppliers of weapons to the Saudi regime for 40 years.
But while British MPs continue to raise fears that UK-made weapons have been used by the Arab kingdom to violate human rights, Mrs May announced last week that the Government will help Saudi Arabia with ‘building a reformed ministry of defence, reviewing Saudi defence capabilities and joint working across the Saudi armed forces’.
Mrs Konczak, meanwhile, claims that BAE’s kowtowing to the Saudis went further than simply turning a blind eye to the treatment she suffered. ‘The Saudis got away with everything. To keep them sweet.’
Last night, when the Mail confronted BAE about Mrs Konczak’s claims, they said in a statement: ‘This case relates to the dismissal of a BAE Systems employee in 2007. While we accept the 2008 tribunal ruling that BAE Systems had not acted in accordance with employment law in the process followed to dismiss Mrs Konczak in 2007, only one of the allegations made regarding events unrelated to her dismissal was upheld.
‘The question the court is currently considering is the apportionment of damages for which BAE Systems is liable arising from Mrs Konczak’s dismissal, given these other allegations were not upheld.
‘We take any allegations of misconduct or discrimination against or by our employees very seriously and we investigate any claims thoroughly and solely on the basis of the facts of the case — regardless of location, position, customer relationships or commercial considerations.’
Mrs Konczak is an unlikely thorn in the side of a company formed in 1999 from the merger of British Aerospace and Marconi. It had a turnover last year of £19 billion.
The daughter of a brewery worker from Blackburn, she left school at 16 and trained as a secretary at Blackburn Technical College.
Early positions included posts with British Fuel, Accrington Borough Council and Blackburn Royal Infirmary, where she was promoted to personal assistant to the director of corporate services.
She was 20 when she married her husband John in 1974 and took a career break to raise their two children, Janine, now 28, a ballet teacher, and 26-year-old Nikolas, an options broker in London.
She arrived at what was then still British Aerospace on a temporary contract in November 1998 and began working for the managers of the controversial £43 billion ‘Al-Yamamah’ arms deal, which was signed by Saudi defence minister Prince Sultan and the then Defence Secretary Michael Heseltine in 1985.
The contract — the biggest ever UK arms deal — saw BAE Systems supply more than 100 fighter jets to
Saudi, but has been dogged ever since by allegations the company offered financial ‘ sweeteners’ to Saudi royals and go-betweens in return for lucrative contracts.
At first, Mrs Konczak’s relations with the Saudi officers seconded to BAE Systems were good.
The officer in charge of the team, Colonel Mosaad Ajjab Al Otaibi, requested that she be made his permanent secretary.
Documents from BAE’s human resources show this was an ‘exceptional situation’ and the ‘only reporting relationship in the UK where a BAE employee reports directly to the customer’.
Mrs Konczak was responsible for ‘life support’ for the Saudis and their families, helping to secure rental properties and organising repairs, arranging nurseries and private schools for their children and finding doctors, dentists, plumbers and electricians.
She shopped for duvets and sheets for their new homes, arranged car washing and once went out with jump leads late at night to start one of their cars.
On another occasion, she was asked to find two deer for venison and arranged for them to be sent in a refrigerated van to a Saudi military attache as a gift.
‘I did everything for them on top of my work as secretary,’ she says. ‘I was often called late in the evening and on bank holidays to resolve problems such as repairs, but I loved my work.’
Out of respect for the men she worked with, she wore trouser suits to work in the luxuriously decorated office furnished with sofas and a prayer room.
She was praised in letters written by the colonel, received two commendations for exceptional performance and two invitations from the ambassador in London to attend celebrations to mark the Saudi Arabian National Day.
But the colonel returned to Saudi Arabia in August 2002, prompting a rapid turnover of staff during the following two years and a change in atmosphere in the office.
In February 2004, says Mrs Konczak, on the very first day of his appointment, a Saudi warrant officer asked if he could kiss her and placed his hands on one of her breasts.
‘He tried to touch me sexually,’ she says. ‘I stopped him right there. I said: “You don’t do things like that.” I reported it to personnel and one or two other people, but because they were Saudis, nothing was done about it.’ In the meantime, she was forced to endure spiteful comments from the warrant officer in question, who ‘did not take kindly to being put in his place by a woman’.
‘He thought he had the right to touch my breasts and I’d told him what I thought. He didn’t like it.’
Matters deteriorated with the arrival in July 2004 of a new senior officer in charge of the RSAF liaison team, a captain who, court documents report, often shouted at Mrs Konczak in front of the officer who had groped her.
In January 2005, a day before she was due to return to work after Christmas, Mrs Konczak received a phone call instructing her not to return to the RSAF liaison team office at Samlesbury, but to go instead to Warton. She was told at a meeting that the Saudi captain had requested her removal.
‘I’d done nothing wrong,’ she says. ‘I was just kicked out.’ She says she was left without a desk and with no formal role while her old job was given to a temporary secretary. ‘It was humiliating and degrading,’ she says. After a year of uncertainty about her role, plans were made to move Mrs Konczak back to Samlesbury to work alongside two BAE employees closely connected to the Saudi captain she claimed had bullied and harassed her.
It was at this moment, as she expressed her unhappiness about working with them, that her manager, Jeremy Dent, uttered what is now referred to in the case as ‘The Dent Comment’.
‘ Women take things more emotionally than men while men tend to forget things and move on,’ he said.
According to Mrs Konczak: ‘I found his comments offensive, humiliating and degrading particularly bearing in mind that I had only minutes before expressed my concerns and been in tears in front of him.’
That comment in April 2006, as several judges have found, was the ‘final straw’ for Mrs Konczak. She was signed off with work-related stress and lodged grievances via BAE’s internal complaints system. None of them was upheld. After a year of wrangling, during which time she offered to return to work, she was sacked on the grounds there was no alternative employment for her.
A tribunal in Manchester in October 2008 ruled Mrs Konczak was a victim of sexual discrimination and her dismissal was unfair and ‘an act of victimisation’.
Since then she and BAE have been back and forth to court more than a dozen times.
Mrs Konczak was awarded £360,000 in October 2014. Last week’s hearing at the Court of Appeal marked BAE’s latest bid to have what they claim is a ‘grossly excessive’ amount reduced.
While Mrs Konczak acknowledges that the amount will seem inflated to some, she argues that the net figure after tax she will receive is closer to £250,000.
At least a fifth of that will go on legal fees while £ 150,000 of it represents six years of lost earnings as well £74,000 allocated for loss of pension.
TO GIVE the figure of £ 360,000 perspective, last year, BAE’s chief executive Ian King earned £3.5 million.
Mrs Konczak is surviving on incapacity benefit and her husband’s earnings. At the time she lost her job, he had given up work as an engineer to retrain as a solicitor.
The couple are in debt and Mrs Konczak has two county court judgements against her because of bills she has been unable to pay. She says she has been condemned to a ‘poverty-stricken retirement’.
Though she did, in the early stages of her legal battle, try to find work, the ill health she has suffered has made that impossible. ‘I can’t deal with people any more,’ she says. ‘I can’t socialise. I can’t go out. I can’t function.’
‘The award is nothing compared to the suffering I’ve had. I’ve changed as a person.
‘I’ll be financially ruined even if I get the money. The house is falling to pieces. We can’t afford to live. They’re continuing to cause us immense distress as a family. I just want all of this to stop.’
The panel of three judges who heard the case last week will give their ruling at a later date.
But whatever their decision, there can be little doubt that there is more to this sorry tale than just an off-the-cuff sexist remark.
As Mrs Konczak puts it: ‘ By raising complaints of discrimination and harassment against personnel of the RSAF who are effectively the representatives in this country of one of BAE’s biggest clients, I inadvertently stumbled into a no-go area. I am still fighting for justice.’