Corporate clients, often in their capacity as employers, call upon our services for any number of reasons. Usually it concerns an employee taking time off sick and suspected of being a little, shall we say Economical with the truth! Employers don’t use the services of a private detective agency lightly. It’s normally because they have good reason to suspect things are not as an employee may want them to believe.
Background
A recent case involved an employee who was not only on long term sick and claiming full pay due to workplace injury but also making a series of claims against his employers totalling over £100,000. A sizeable sum of money largely due to the assertion that he would never be able to work again.
Suspicion
The employers had received a tip off that all was not as they were being told and that the employee maybe worth looking into. With this information and having used our services to good effect before, a meeting was set up with the HR department of the employers. With the matter discussed it was decided to place the employee (now our subject) under a period of surveillance.
Suspicions justified
Our operatives were deployed observing the subject’s home address in Leamington Spa. On the first day the subject was seen to leave his home and get into a Vauxhall Astra van. He was followed to an industrial estate in Kenilworth.
The subject was seen to retrieve overalls from the rear of the van as well as several electrical tools and then enter one of the units. Usefully the frontage of the unit was glass to help with natural sunlight which afforded us a clear view. Our Subject was seen to work on several vehicles preparing them for body work repairs.
He was observed within the unit to sand down metal work and spray previously prepared vehicles. The subject was also seen to carry large items such as space heaters which should have been impossible for a man with his claimed injuries.
This carried on over the course of the week. Everything was captured on video and a report was prepared and handed into our client.
A Satisfying Conclusion
The subject decided to brazen it out and set upon taking the case to a tribunal.
Eventually he settled on mediation having taken advice from his legal team regarding the amount of evidence that we had compiled.
We then received the wonderful news that the employee (or rather former employee) had to accept a mediocre £5,000!
Apart from what our services cost (which was a damn sight less than £100k) we had saved our client £95,000.
The client’s email to us signed off with:
“Thank you for all your help, it really helped in what was a complex case”.
Article submitted by Melvyn Rattenbury – Full Member no. F1691
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