STAFF CLAIM THEY’RE COMPANIES LINKED TO
STAFF who worked for companies run by a well-known Welsh entrepreneur claim they are still owed thousands of pounds years after their employment ended.
Workers at i4 Technology Group Ltd and Broadband Infrastructure Company Ltd, which installed high-speed broadband, claim they have not been paid amounts awarded to them in employment tribunals in the past two years.
The largest of these surpasses £65,000 and they include claims for breach of contract, unfair dismissal and unlawful deductions from wages.
A number of staff, several of whom have spoken to Wales on Sunday, claim they are still trying to recoup the money years after the tribunal decisions were handed down.
Both the companies which were ruled against are linked to Elfed Wyn Thomas, a well-known entrepreneur based in North Wales who was once billed as a millionaire and the mastermind behind a host of fibre broadband companies in the UK.
Based in Colwyn Bay, Mr Thomas, 64, was formerly CEO of H20 Networks, which delivered the UK’s first fibre-tohome networks in Bournemouth and Dundee in the 2000s.
He was awarded Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year for the North and Midlands Region in 2010 but faced legal issues when in that same year the Serious Fraud Office started a sevenyear investigation which saw six people, including Mr Thomas, accused of being involved in a £160m fake contracts scam. Four people were jailed after a trial in 2017 but Mr Thomas was cleared of any wrongdoing.
A host of staff who worked at Mr Thomas’ companies claim they have been unable to recoup thousands of pounds awarded to them via employment tribunals in the past few years.
Alan Walker, 59, had worked in the broadband industry since 2017 and was made redundant from a major fibre broadband provider shortly before the pandemic. In January 2020, he got in touch with Mr Thomas who offered to meet at a hotel near Manchester and who, he said, offered him a job as a business development manager with Broadband Infrastructure Company Limited.
Mr Thomas was a director at Broadband Infrastructure until December 2022 and there is currently an active proposal to strike off the company on Companies House.
When Mr Walker first went to the company’s office in Parc Menai, he said he was “shocked by how empty it was”, adding: “There were just a few people working there, including Elfed.”
Mr Walker’s job was delayed due to the pandemic and when he started in July 2020, he claims it was “evident there was no money to back up the promises” being made about the company rolling out high-speed broadband.
“I was one of four salesmen. Elfed had been telling us the company could offer a 1GB feed and targeted with going after new-build developments of 20-30 properties and putting our technology into the site.
“How he was going to recoup the money I don’t know. I emailed someone else at the company to ask for prices to give potential customers and was given stuff that was nothing near the 1GB.”
At the end of his first month Mr Walker claims he wasn’t paid, adding that when he was a few weeks later, it was the incorrect sum. He alleges he was never paid on time after that point.
“It was just chaos all the time,” he said.
When England entered its second lockdown that November, coinciding with the latter stage of a firebreak lockdown in Wales, Mr Walker was furloughed for five months. He claims he was told he would get five payments for this period but only received two.
In January 2021 he became more worried when he contacted the pension company his employer was supposed to be paying his contributions to and claims they had no record of him.
“I did a bit of digging in January and contacted our pensions company Nest who had never heard of us. I asked Elfed where my pension money was and was just told it ‘needs addressing.’ My furlough and pension had just disappeared.
“In February 2021 we expected we were going back to work. I then got an email with a copy of a letter [in March] saying I was being made redundant as the company could no longer afford to pay me.”
After trying to reclaim some of the money he was owed, Mr Walker engaged with a solicitor and managed to secure an employment tribunal, which in January 2022 found Broadband Infrastructure Company Limited had deducted his salary for pension contributions but had never paid them to pension company Nest.
It also confirmed Mr Walker’s own investigations found no pension had ever been set up for him.
The tribunal also found Mr Walker had never been given a contract of employment despite requests, that his salary was sometimes not paid or paid late, and he sometimes “received occasional ad hoc sums without any reference provided as to what they related to”.
Mr Walker contacted the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (Acas) in March 2021 in an attempt to resolve the issues but was made redundant that same month. The tribunal said “two other employees, undertaking work similar to the claimant’s, were however recruited shortly afterwards”.
The company was ordered to pay him £2,945.86 (£1,730.76 gross in respect of notice, £102.60 in respect of expenses, and £1,112.50 in respect of pension contributions) for breach of contract, £9,367.35 for unfair dismissal, £6,339.85 in unauthorised deductions from wages, £2,250 in holiday pay, and £1,076 for failing to provide written particulars of employment. The total owed was £21,979.06.
Despite the decision, Mr Walker claims he has not received his money from the company despite repeated efforts to do so.
“I ended up with a debt collect company – the people on [TV show] Can’t Pay? We’ll Take it Away,” he said.
“They must have visited [Mr Thomas’] home directly several times.”
He claims they tried to set up payment plans with Mr Thomas in 2022 and Mr Walker did receive a £500 payment but he has not received anything since.
Footage seen by Wales on Sunday shows Cobra Financial Solutions, a debt collection agency based in Liverpool, calling at Mr Thomas’ door on April 15 this year.
It shows him opening his front door wearing cycling trousers and a T-shirt and being asked by the debt collector to confirm who he is before being told their visit is related to Broadband Infrastructure Company owing Mr Walker nearly £22,000.
“Yeah but obviously at the moment the company has no money,” he replies. “We’re trying to sort things out. [The company] stopped trading two years ago. There’s no money... there’s no money.”
Mr Thomas can be heard saying “it’s going bankrupt” and it has “been through a pandemic”. The debt collector is heard saying his client may be going down the legal route to recoup the money, to which Mr Thomas says: “That’s entirely up to them – I can’t stop them. If they want to do that that’s up to them.”
Mr Thomas is then heard saying he has been “waiting for a contract to come in” and that there have been “delays and delays”, adding: “It still might come in but I don’t want to say it comes in and it doesn’t... until it comes in there’s nothing I can do.”
When pressed about what the contract is he says it is “a project, a project... some work abroad”. “Until that comes in, if it comes in – I’m sure it will come in – there’s nothing.”
Mr Thomas is heard again saying he has no money and no longer has a car and adds: “If you come back to us in a month’s time we’ll know then what’s going on. We’ve been waiting since last August on this.”
The debt collector hands Mr Thomas a card with their details and says they will report back what he has told them to Mr Walker.
“It’s not dead but we’ve been waiting a long time and that’s because it’s a complex deal,” Mr Thomas says.
When told he was not denying owing money, he responds: “The company does owe money yeah. I don’t personally but the company does definitely owe money.”
Mr Walker told us he had been left with few other options to try and recoup his money. He claimed of Mr Thomas: “He’s like a Poundland Robert Maxwell. He treats his staff like dirt.”
Peter McCormick, 63, was based in Snowdonia when in November 2020 he was offered the job as national sales manager for i4 Technology Group Ltd which is still listed as active on Companies House and of which Mr Thomas remains a co-director.
He claims he was told the company would be providing broadband to councils, new-builds and housing estates of different sizes. In February 2021 he claims he was given two weeks’ pay despite working the entire month, which he was told would be rectified.
“The second month I got [paid] from a different company. I still hadn’t had my car allowance which was £500 a month. Every time I got paid there were bits missing, weeks missing,” he claims.
“We were told there was a big investment for infrastructure of £2-3m coming in January that just never came. I was told to start looking for people to provide to and everything. My stepson John Golding was interested and came on board.
“It got to May [2021] and we were then told the funding wouldn’t come until August but that we needed to start lining up some customers. I had started working with councils across the UK
who were negotiating with me on contracts worth about £4-5m.”
Mr McCormick claims his wages had mostly been corrected by May 2021 when he claims he then received a call from someone else from the company to say they had a foreclosure due to non-payment of a debt and he was being made redundant.
He added: “John and I would spend day and night uploading hundreds of bits of data on the CRM and then the rug was pulled. John had just had a new baby and all of a sudden he was unemployed.”
A few weeks later Mr McCormick claims he received a call from a recruitment centre advertising a national sales manager. “About halfway through I asked if it was for the company I worked for previously and it was,” he claims. “I was told it had been foreclosed and now they were advertising my job. The websites are very futuristic but it is all a pipe dream.”
In March 2022 i4 Technology was ordered to pay Mr McCormick £5,810.83 in damages for breach of contract after he was dismissed without notice and £6,547.51 for unlawful deductions from his wages, making £12,358.34 in total. But he claims he has yet to receive the money despite going through several collection agencies in an effort to recover the debt.
Dave Bradford, 61, is a network engineer in Holyhead and previously worked with i4 Technology Group Limited from April 2021 and March 2022. In July 2022 he was awarded £6,599.52 in unlawfully-deducted wages from the company, which he claims he still has not received.
Mr Thomas, on behalf of i4 Technology, later asked for the tribunal decision to be reconsidered, saying he had not been aware of the proceedings until he received an enforcement order made by the county court at Gloucester and Cheltenham.
Mr Thomas said this was because information on the tribunal was sent to M Sparc Menai Science Park in Anglesey but the company’s address had been changed to Telford Lodge in Conwy. The tribunal rejected this, saying the claim form was sent to the correct address at the time.
Mr Bradford said he was happy to find a job in his industry which he hoped would better people’s lives in his area of North Wales.
“It was nice to find something local and that contributed to the local community. There aren’t many jobs on Anglesey or North Wales,” he said.
But he describes his time at the company, which he claims he was made redundant from in 2022, as an “entire shambles” and paints a picture of “an overall culture of incompetent dealings with clients, employees and vendors.”
He said: “It was an entire shambles. If we needed supplies, like fibre optics, they wouldn’t supply them and say they hadn’t paid for the last order.”
Mr Walker, Mr McCormick and Mr Bradford, along with a group of other former staff, have come together in a an attempt to force both i4 Technology Group Ltd and Broadband Infrastructure Company Ltd to go insolvent, which would guarantee them a small amount of money from the government – though for many of them it will not be as much as they are owed.
“The options are for us to force the company to go compulsively insolvent, which we are looking at trying to get the money together for. The other is for him to go voluntarily insolvent,” Mr Walker, who is based in Stockport and still works in the broadband industry, explained.
“Personally speaking I want him stopped. I don’t want him to do this to other people. I have sent him a colossal amount of emails and texts. He made an £18,000 offer to me in December but he owes me more than that. I don’t trust him.
“I had cancer back in 2016. All he’s done is put piles of stress on me. I’m 60 in September and I have a nice life.
“We have a nice house, holidays, cars. The motivational thing for me is stopping him doing this to someone else.
“I’m a bloody-minded Mancunian. I will keep pushing this until Elfed Thomas is stopped and can’t employ any more people. Otherwise he will not learn his lesson. We’re a bloody nuisance to him. He bills himself as the Alan Sugar of Wales.”
Mr McCormick said employment tribunal results must be stamped by a county court and the only listed address he had was for Mr Thomas which is why he, as co-director, has been pursued for the money.
Although pursuing compulsory insolvency will each cost them hundreds of pounds, the former staff say they believe this is their best hope of recouping any money.
“If you can make the company insolvent there is a £4-5,000 sum you can get guaranteed by the government,” Mr McCormick said, adding the ordeal of chasing the money has affected his mental health after he previously moved back to the UK having suffered a serious accident in Cyprus.
“I’ve had to get counselling and I am on medication for depression. I’m a lot better than I was two years ago but I was suicidal. The toll it has taken on us as a family has been horrific. The reason we’ve come through this is because my wife survived Hillsborough and lost a family member next to her.
“She recognised the signs [of mental health issues] and helped me through it. The financial bit is almost not the important bit. The only thing in terms of retribution is seeing those companies close.”
Mr McCormick said he had been in “the depths of despair” over the matter and had to spend “mental and physical” energy to recover, adding they had to financially help out his stepson who had been made redundant from i4.
“It must have cost around £25,000, most of which we will never see. It’s been a rough ride and we’ve survived but it’s not been easy.”
Mr Bradford claims he was given a £400 payment but hasn’t received any more and has also used a collection company to try to get it back.
He said: “It’s totally frustrating. This is as much to stop him from doing anything else. We want to put a stop to him.
“You are the one stuck with having to get debt collectors. He is not destitute – he has a lovely address in Conwy. The law is powerless to do anything about him. I’ve more or less accepted that I’m never going to get my money back.”
There have been a number of other tribunal decisions ordering Mr Thomas’ companies to pay money to former staff. In March 2022, i4 Technology
Group Limited was ordered to pay £8,971.44 (£8,410.44 in unauthorised wage deductions and £516 in holiday entitlement) to Callum Saunderson.
The same company must also pay £5,692.96 to Mr I Griffiths.
In October 2023, an employment tribunal awarded £65,635.29 to Harvinder Chatha for unauthorised wage deductions by i4 Technology between October 2021 and January 2023.
In 2022 John Golding was also awarded £3,820.47 in total – £2,916.66 in unauthorised deductions of wages, £673.05 in damages for failing to give one month’s notice of redundancy, and £230.76 in respect of holiday pay owed.
We contacted Mr Thomas regarding Mr Walker, Mr McCormick and Mr Bradford’s claims regarding their employment, the tribunal decisions against both i4 Technology and Broadband Infrastructure Company, their claims about tribunal awards not being paid, and their own personal views on him.
He issued the following statement in response: “In light of recent events, it is important to clarify that all involved parties have agreed to confidentiality terms, including Mr Walker through a verbal agreement.
“The disclosure of any information outside the parameters of the award constitutes a violation of these terms.
“Like many during the unprecedented times of the Covid-19 pandemic, our company faced significant cash flow challenges. To address these issues and advance our operations, our shareholders and directors have collectively invested over £1.2m.
“Despite these efforts, external circumstances have regrettably led us to the decision to proceed with a Creditors’ Voluntary Liquidation (CVL).
“It is pertinent to note that the claims made by certain individuals in tribunal do not accurately reflect the reality of their employment durations or conditions. The longest tenure among the claimants exceeded just 12 months, while others were employed for no more than two months. These employment offers were contingent upon project initiations, which, unfortunately, did not materialise.
“The allegations, inaccuracies in public statements, and direct threats directed towards our company and individuals are both surprising and disheartening.
“We intend to maintain our commitment to ethical practices and legal standards as we navigate through this closure process. No further statements will be issued at this time.”
Mr Walker, Mr McCormick and Mr Bradford all deny they ever agreed to any form of non-disclosure agreement with Mr Thomas forbidding them from discussing matters related to their employment at i4 Technology or Broadband Infrastructure.
For mental health support, contact the Samaritans on 116 123, email them at jo@samaritans.org or visit samaritans.org to find your nearest branch.
I am on medication for depression. I was suicidal. The toll it has taken on us as a family has been horrific
PETER MCCORMICK