Denise’s beau is outed over plot to ‘steal client details’

DENISE VAN OUTEN’S fiancé 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, both pictured, just weeks before he was sacked by commodity broker SCB & Associate for ‘gross misconduct and material dishonesty’, an employment tribunal has heard.

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 to a private account. The firm said Mr Boxshall sought to ‘cover his tracks’ by then deleting emails.

Father-of-two Mr Boxshall, who is suing SCB for unfair dismissal, told the 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.

The tribunal heard that Mr Boxshall – who began dating the Ireland’s Got Talent judge Van Outen, 44, in 2014 – had earned £110,000 a year as a SCB trader and that his performance had dipped in the year before he was dismissed.

After a meeting to discuss a potential pay-off, he began to act ‘suspiciously’, according to SCB’s lawyer. The firms subsequently learned that Mr Boxshall had set up a company in ‘the exact same business area’. Judgment in the case has been reserved.