London - A former Deutsche Bank executive fired when female colleagues accused him of sexual harassment won a discrimination lawsuit after London judges ruled the women had lied, exaggerated and used lewd language themselves.
Konrad Joy, who was chief operating officer in the global risk department, reached a settlement with the bank after the London Employment Tribunal ruled in his favour. The decision, issued in December and only released this week, criticised the bank’s handling of the complaints.
Many of the accusations were “simply accepted at face value, not investigated further,” the judges said, and the bank’s investigation had been “very poor.”
Deutsche Bank initially appealed the decision, but later decided to settle the case on confidential terms. Joy, 44, had been seeking as much as 20 million pounds ($30 million) in compensation.
“The matter has been resolved,” said Charlie Olivier, a bank spokesman, and declined to comment further. Joy, who won on sexual discrimination and harassment claims, didn’t respond to a request for comment passed on by Deutsche Bank’s lawyers.
Personal accusations
Even in comparison with a recent spate of employment tribunal cases that have pitched bankers and traders into messy legal battles with banks, Joy’s lawsuit was marked by personal accusations and offensive language.
Deutsche Bank said in court documents prepared for a trial last year that 11 junior colleagues, including personal assistants in their 20s, made allegations about Joy, including that he made comments about “female employees’ breasts,” invited two women to “have a threesome” and discussed adult films “openly in the office.”
But the court agreed with Joy’s arguments that the lender’s investigation was handled differently because he’s a man.
“The whole factual matrix on which the decision to dismiss was based was, in itself, infused with, and tainted by, discrimination,” Judge Graeme Hodgson said in the ruling. “The conclusions on the claimant’s behaviour are founded on stereotyped assumptions of how a man behaves.”
Jim Turley, Deutsche Bank’s head of global business services and a member of the disciplinary panel that decided to fire Joy, said he found it difficult to believe that women would use offensive language, as Joy alleged.
“He was clearly making an assumption based on gender,” Hodgson said.
A female employee in the risk division had accused Joy of describing a colleague performing a sex act on a manager. The judges said there was “clear evidence of embellishment” in her testimony and that “she had no difficulty in using swear words.”
Similarly, allegations that Joy had encouraged “slapping and pinching bums” and invited two women to take part in a sex act at a Christmas party were false and amounted to harassment, the tribunal found.
Joy, who joined a bank training program after leaving school in 1989 before being dismissed in 2013. told the judges during the trial that female co-workers had willingly shared personal details with him and described a “ladette” culture at the bank.
“When my comments are taken out of context, my language may seem extreme, which it was not,” he said in a statement provided during the hearing. He said the allegations were “shocking, untrue and slanderous”.
BLOOMBERG