Denise Van Outen fiance sacked for ‘plot to steal employer’s customers’
THE fiance of TV presenter Denise Van Outen has been accused of stealing customers and commercially sensitive information from his employers to set up his own rival business.
Eddie Boxshall, 45, proposed to Ms Van Outen just weeks before he was sacked by SCB & Associates – a City commodity broker – for ‘gross misconduct and material dishonesty’, an employment tribunal heard last week.
He was hauled before a disciplinary panel after bosses discovered he had sent hundreds of emails containing clients’ contact details and confidential information from his work account to a private account.
The firm said Mr Boxshall then sought to ‘cover his tracks’ by deleting dozens of the highly sensitive emails.
Father-of-two Mr Boxshall, who is suing SCB for unfair dismissal, told the Central London Employment Tribunal that he swore ‘on his children’s lives’ that he had not tried to defraud the company and was the victim of a scheme concocted by his bosses to cut costs.
‘It became obviously apparent to me and my colleagues that something was cooking to get me out of the company,’ he said.
The tribunal heard that Mr Boxshall worked on SCB’s energy desk where he earned £110,000 a year as a trader buying and selling stocks of oil, and that his performance had dipped in the year before he was dismissed.
After a meeting to discuss a potential pay-off, he sent a message to his boss, Joachim Emanuelsson. It said: ‘I’ve asked Denise to marry me last weekend and want to take some time out with her until I find a job again… Would you agree to round tax-free [up] to £30k and I will agree to stay away for three months as of us agreeing payment?’ he wrote.
But Ruth Stone, SCB’s lawyer, claimed Mr Boxshall then began to act ‘suspiciously’.
‘As there was a significant possibility of Mr Boxshall shortly leaving the company’s employment and Mr Boxshall had been acting suspiciously in the office, Mr Emanuelsson and I were mindful of the risk that Mr Boxshall might seek to appropriate the company’s confidential information and subsequently use it to compete against the company,’ she told the tribunal.
Her concern grew when she learned that Mr Boxshall had set up Black Gold Energy Ltd, a company in ‘the exact same business area’.
But Mr Boxshall accused SCB of not holding a ‘genuine belief’ in his misconduct, instead trying to ‘lighten the cost of the energy desk because he was the highest-paid’.
He added: ‘I regularly sent myself work-related material to my personal email address so I could review this information in my own spare time.
‘I certainly was not sharing any confidential information with a third party.’
Mr Boxshall began dating Ms Van Outen, 44, in 2014. In an interview in July, the TV presenter,
‘He set up a company in the exact same business’
who previously dated Jamiroquai singer Jay Kay – and who has an eight-year-old daughter with ex-husband Lee Mead – said she wanted more children but feared she was too old.
Mr Boxshall told the hearing that he and the former Big Breakfast presenter had decided to ‘pull the plug’ on trying for a baby at about the time of his dismissal in July 2017.
Judgment in the case has been reserved.