Buyer wins £G,000 in Ken Bell tribunal
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NE by Ian Wylie
A former employee of North-east seafood company Ken Bell International has won £6,000 in compensation at an industrial tribunal following his dismissal for allegedly passing on high-priced haulage jobs to a friend (CM12-18 August).
The company, based in Jesmond, Newcastle, uses its own refrigerated trucks, but senior buyer Bob Dunbar was sacked by company chairman Ken Bell last September when it was discovered that Dunbar had used Newcastle airport-based Gazelle Transport Services on 11 of the 58 runs during the year.
Gazelle did not have its own refrigerated lorries and sub-contracted the work, which Bell said meant higher rates for his firm to pay.
Dunbar—who was responsible for purchasing products worth between £.3 million and E6m a year, mostly from Scandanavia—told the tribunal there were problems with the company's own transport system and Gazelle was reliable and could handle Customs clearance. But the tribunal heard from Bell how a problem with an order of prawns left the company with a 140,000 duty bill. He said: "We had lorry drivers sitting about doing nothing, so why was Dunbar using Gazelle?"
Dunbar insisted he was not guilty of the allegation of distributing work to Gazelle just because he was friends with the boss. He said the amount of work he distributed was tiny and only done to get orders in on time. After the tribunal, Bell admitted he "went in like a bull in a china shop" over the dismissal procedure.