Indian Commonwealth Official Wins Employment Dismissal Case in UK

An Indian official won an employment tribunal claim against Commonwealth Secretary General Patricia Scotland, who he claimed had unlawfully forced him out of his job at the Commonwealth Secretariat in London, PTI reported.

Noting that the disciplinary processes used against Ram Venuprasad were “seriously flawed,” the tribunal chaired by David Goddard ruled that the action against the 45-year-old former official was a “breach of the secretariat’s obligations” under its employment contract. The tribunal is now set to take submissions regarding the amount of compensation to be awarded to him.

Venuprasad had said that he was entitled to thousands of pounds in wage for Scotland’s “unfair disciplining” over alleged leaks of information to media by him — something he denied he had done. The action against Venuprasad, the former deputy head of office at Secretariat who joined the organization in 2001, was taken in July 2016 over these allegations.

According to Venuprasad’s lawyers, he was “marked out” by Scotland after he raised concerns over her decision to spend £50,000 on a garden party soon after she took office in 2016. His legal team told the specially-convened employment tribunal that as media reports spoke of Scotland’s alleged “extravagant and overzealous spending,” the Venuprasad was blamed for “leaks of information” and had to undergo a campaign of “intimidation and hostility” that was “designed to damage his reputation and damage him psychologically.”

The tipping point of this hostility came when the Scotland, 62, organized a meeting for staff and caused a stir when she said no one outside of the organization had ever heard of her predecessor, Kamalesh Sharma, the former Indian High Commissioner to the UK. The implication, according to Venuprasad, was that Scotland was a big name who would raise the profile of the Secretariat, the Times reported.

“I spoke to her directly and frankly about her comments. I told her that I thought her criticisms were very unfair as (Sharma) was not there to defend himself. I saw it as a question of common courtesy. And she did not like that,” Venuprasad told the publication.

The tribunal, held at Secretariat headquarters in Marlborough House in London, came to the conclusion that the Venuprasad was unlawfully forced out of his job. The panel also came down on Scotland for failing to furnish evidence, saying that the failure “overlooks the Secretariat’s responsibility to assist the tribunal to reach an informed decision, and the real risk of adverse inferences being drawn.”

This ruling came soon after the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting concluded in London on April 20. “Despite receiving the judgment last week, I did not want to speak publicly until the conclusion of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in London,” Venuprasad, who has been living in the United Kingdom for 20 years, told the Times.