William Hill to pay former executive nearly £70k after ‘flawed sexual harassment probe'
William Hill has been instructed to pay nearly £70,000 to a former executive after an employment tribunal concluded he was unfairly dismissed. The ruling followed allegations of sexual harassment and a subsequent flawed internal investigation.
Joe Tobin, previously the "head of search" at the gambling firm, was dismissed without notice last year. It came after a disciplinary hearing in August found he had touched a female colleague's body and stuck his fingers in her mouth in a pub in Soho where people were watching England play Denmark in the Euros on June 20.
Mr Tobin claimed that he had been unfairly dismissed and an employment tribunal judge ruled in his favour in April, saying the internal probe 'was not satisfactory', highlighting in particular that the organisation did not request CCTV footage from the bar, and citing that police had found no evidence of any sexual assault.
William Hill has now been ordered to pay Mr Tobin £68,065, subject to tax deductions.
The tribunal heard that the woman had asked other colleagues to ensure she was not left alone with Mr Tobin ahead of their arrival at the Soho pub, explaining he gave her a 'weird vibe' and that the pair had had disagreements – including one over the Israel-Palestine war at the company Christmas party.
Of the evening, she said in her statement to the tribunal: 'Every time the claimant would join a conversation with me and others he would put his arm on my back and slowly move his hand lower to my butt before moving his arms off completely. This happened more than once.
'Later on Frankie (another colleague) and I were having a conversation when Joe joined us. As Frankie was sharing the story I reacted which left my mouth wide open. This is when Joe pushed his fingers down my mouth.'
She described how she was 'shocked' and grabbed Mr Tobin's hand, prompting him to take his fingers out and laugh, before going to the toilet where she 'gargled and rinsed her mouth and cried'.
She submitted a grievance on July 5 and Mr Tobin was informed of the allegations on July 17 during a meeting with his line manager.
Mr Tobin was said to have felt 'physically sick' after being told of the allegations, which he said were 'serious' and 'horrible to hear'.
He admitted speaking to the woman, saying it was 'all friendly', and insisted he did not recall any inappropriate behaviour, according to the tribunal.
At a disciplinary meeting in August, dismissing officer Gavin Hilton concluded that Mr Tobin had committed gross misconduct in breaching William Hill's Equality-Everyone Matters policy.
Mr Hilton said: 'There has been a lot of noise around the night, focused on allegations of inappropriate physical conduct which could be construed as sexual harassment towards a colleague.
'We've heard from a number of witnesses and my belief is something did happen. We've not taken this decision lightly. Consequently, I've decided that an appropriate sanction would be summary dismissal.'
The woman reported the incident to the police earlier in August, and an officer concluded upon viewing CCTV footage from the pub that they 'did not see any sexual assault or other forms of criminal or unacceptable behaviour', ending the investigation with no action taken.
Employment Judge Walker said Mr Hilton's decision was 'based on brief witness statements' and that overall there were 'very limited grounds' for reaching the conclusion that Mr Tobin had committed the alleged misconduct.
The judge said the company made 'no effort at all' to contact the bar and request the CCTV footage, adding: 'The impact of a dismissal for gross misconduct in relation to an allegation of harassment is extremely serious and one which is likely to have career-ending outcome for the individual – in those circumstances the effort needed to apply for the CCTV was entirely reasonable.'
'The key issue in my view is the failure to try to obtain this CCTV and take reasonable steps to review it and the general approach taken to interviewing only enough witnesses to support the complainant's case without any real regard for the possibility of looking for evidence to exonerate Mr Tobin renders this dismissal unfair,' they went on.
'Overall, this was not a satisfactory investigation, and the disciplinary hearing manager did not challenge the evidence enough to make that inconsequential.'
The judge said the police statement is 'clear evidence' that the alleged incident did not occur and concluded Mr Tobin did not commit gross misconduct and was unfairly dismissed, with William Hill in breach of contract in failing to pay the claimant's notice pay.
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If you ever thought, as I did growing up there, that Northern Ireland's fame was limited to 30 years of bombs and bullets, or building a ship that sank on its maiden voyage — you'd better think again. Twenty-one years ago, we were also host to the biggest robbery in British or Irish history at the time — in fact, the sixth biggest robbery in the world. Pretty impressive, eh? In one sense, it was impressive. On December 20, 2004, £26.5 million in cash was stolen from the Northern Bank headquarters in Belfast's city centre — in clear view of the public as Christmas shoppers strolled round the continental market just feet away. Glenn Patterson, an admired Belfast-based novelist, has written a book showing how the robbers did it, and how they got away with it. It was not just a monetary robbery, but a symbolic one. The Northern Bank building is a landmark in Belfast's post-industrial city centre, a great, sturdy 1970s edifice in concrete. It's a building you can imagine Bill Bixby walking out of, coat over shoulder, in the credits for The Incredible Hulk. But the robbery was not the first of its kind that year. Already in 2004 there had been other 'tiger kidnappings', where robbers would take family members hostage and force bank employees to help them to carry out the heist. In response, the Northern Bank had changed its operations so that two key holders were needed simultaneously to access its cash vaults. The criminals' solution? To abduct two employees' family members at once. Kevin McMullan, the bank's assistant manager, and Chris Ward, a junior employee, both had a knock on the door the night before the robbery. Armed men took over their homes and held their families hostage while McMullan and Ward were taken away. The men were held overnight, then told to go to work the next day and act normally. At clocking-off time they were to use their access to remove cash from the vault, disguised in containers to look like rubbish, and load it into a waiting white van. And so they did: great blocks and boxes of new and used notes, kilos upon kilos of it. The cover of Patterson's book shows a CCTV image of Ward leaving the bank's side entrance with a holdall over one shoulder. The holdall contains £1.2 million. Little wonder he's leaning to one side to counter the weight. So who did it? There's no doubt: the only criminal outfit in Northern Ireland with the organisational capability to plan and execute the robbery so methodically was the IRA. (The single sign of amateurishness was that two men in the van wore Russ Abbot-style ginger 'Jimmy' wigs beneath their baseball caps. This odd sight alerted passersby and almost foiled the robbery.) Opinions are divided on why the IRA carried out the robbery. For a pension fund? Investment abroad? • The 21 best history books of the past year to read next The whole story is presented beautifully by Patterson, who adopts the right tone for each phase of the tale. The abduction scenes have the horrible tension of a thriller, and reminded me of Brian Moore's great Troubles novel Lies of Silence. Elsewhere, Patterson adopts a tone of amused incredulity at the shocking details of the robbery and its aftermath. 'You have to take your hat off to this country. It has a way of exceeding your worst, most lavish expectations.' But the robbery also presented a political problem for the British and Irish governments. In 2004, the fledgling Northern Ireland Assembly had collapsed, and there were 'talks about talks' to get it up and running again. Indeed, when MI5 detected high levels of phone activity between senior IRA men the night before the robbery, they optimistically — naively — thought it meant an announcement was imminent on the decommissioning of IRA weapons, to break the political deadlock. When it was announced who the likely culprits were, Sinn Fein — the IRA's political wing — complained of a smear on republicans. But as Patterson points out, in one of the few passages where he sounds truly angry, this was a common tactic for Sinn Fein. He reminds us about the brutal murder of Robert McCartney after an argument in a Belfast bar in January 2005, when nobody in the pub — including the future Stormont minister Deirdre Hargey of Sinn Fein — would speak to the police about what happened. Instead, Hargey claimed that reports of IRA involvement in the murder were 'part of the onslaught by the media and governments and political parties to criminalise Sinn Fein and the republican movement'. As Patterson coolly observes: 'There is chutzpah, and there is chutzpah.' • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what's top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List Hardly any of the money has been recovered, and only one person was prosecuted for the robbery. That person was … one of the victims, Chris Ward, who was prosecuted on circumstantial evidence that the robbery had been an inside job — the IRA men were so well prepared that someone in the bank must have helped them. The case was abandoned partway through. Patterson attended every day of the trial. The case was clearly not an outstanding example of prosecutorial craft. Phil Flynn, who was vice president of Sinn Fein, took the view that 'there was nobody killed. At the end of the day, it was only money.' But it wasn't only money. The robbery revealed a lot about what was important in Northern Ireland. Sinn Fein was welcomed back into government. And in a world where every conspiracy theorist sees two-tier justice in any outcome they don't like, the aftermath of the robbery provided a real example. The senior IRA man Bobby Storey — believed to be the brains behind the robbery, and 'a great human being' in the words of Gerry Adams — died in June 2020 and his funeral attracted more than 1,500 people, in contravention of Covid regulations. Other people could have no more than 30 at theirs. None of the Sinn Fein politicians who attended were prosecuted, while at a Black Lives Matter protest in Belfast a few weeks earlier, 70 people were fined. Patterson had once planned to write a screenplay of the robbery. I wish he had. It has everything: tension, dark comedy, human interest, big issues and more. But this book will do very nicely in its place. And if the Northern Bank heist was indeed a symbolic robbery, then here is the other symbol. Why did they do it? Because they knew they could get away with it. As Patterson points out: 'Something [else] disappeared in that white van in December 2004 that has never been recovered.' The Northern Bank Job: The Heist and How They Got Away With It by Glenn Patterson (Head of Zeus £16.99 pp272). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
