Claim against Lord Ranger by former staffer dismissed
CLAIMANT ‘ACTED DISHONESTLY AND DESTROYED EVIDENCE’
AN EMPLOYMENT tribunal in Watford has dismissed a £673,000 claim by a former employee against Lord Rami Ranger and the company he founded, Sun Mark.
Employment appeal judge Hyams ruled that the former employee, Ramandeep Kaur, had acted dishonestly and destroyed crucial evidence, including a phone recording covertly made against Lord Ranger, a notebook and a second phone, during the hearing on January 9 and 10.
The judge described Kaur’s conduct as “plainly scandalous, unreasonable and vexatious”.
The claim was centred on a phone call on October 5, 2018, when Kaur alleged that the Tory peer made derogatory remarks to her, and a notepad which contained recorded events in connection with her charge.
That recording of the conversation, which took place in Punjabi, was made without the knowledge or consent of Lord Ranger. Kaur alleged that during the call, he called her a prostitute and said he would kill her.
However, the tribunal found specifically that those things were not said by the peer.
“We do not find that Lord Ranger threatened to kill the claimant. … He did not call her a prostitute. The allegation those things were said was based on the fact that they were included in a translation of the recording of the conversation of 5 October 2018 made by a company called Atlas Translations Ltd,” the judge was quoted as saying.
Following a court order on April 24, 2020, an independent translation of the phone conversation was made, which failed to prove Kaur’s claims.
She told the tribunal she had broken the mobile phone into pieces and threw it into the river in Hayes as it apparently had intimate pictures of her and her fiancé.
She added that the other crucial piece of evidence, the notepad, was burnt by her husband as he was “upset by its contents”.
The judge termed her claims “nonsense and implausible”. He observed that she either lied or she destroyed them on purpose fearing a forensic inspection in the future.
The judge said Lord Ranger may have been provoked in the call and a fair hearing was impossible without the whole conversation recording.
Following the judgement, claims for unfair dismissal and victimisation were withdrawn.
Sun Mark welcomed the judgement.
“After four difficult years of defending our position, we are pleased that the employment tribunal has come to the right decision by dismissing and striking out the entire claim for £673,000 by Ramandeep Kaur, against Lord Rami Ranger,” said Harmeet Ahuja, CEO of Sun Mark.
“The company, chairman and directors take their responsibilities as an employer very seriously. We consider our company to be a Sun Mark family-run enterprise. The last four years have taken an unspeakable toll on the Ranger and Sun Mark family. “The judge rightly concluded in respect of the destruction of key evidence that her (Mrs Kaur’s) deliberate destruction of those things, or lying in saying she had destroyed them, was intended to prevent the respondents and the tribunal from considering further material which could have affected the outcome of the proceedings in a significant way.”