Svetlana Lokhova, who was dubbed as `Crazy Miss Cokehead`, among many other things, has been awarded £3.2 million after a tribunal agreed that she had been sexually harrassed at work. This is a huge payout, particularly for someone who had only 1 years employment with Sberbank CIB, but there were factors that led the tribunal to award this amount of compensation for her claims.
Ms Lokhova was awarded £44,000 by the court for her hurt feelings and a further £15,000 compensation was awarded in aggravated damages. But the bulk of the compensation, £3.14 million, was awarded towards her future loss of earnings. This was because her annual salary was £750,000 per year at Sberbank CIB, working in equity sales, and in fact her legal team had claimed compensation of £19 million for her loss of earnings etc, but this figure was dismissed as it was felt she could certainly gain employment again, albeit it was not likely that it would be in the banking industry.
Ms Lokhova had made a total of 22 claims but only 3 of them were actually upheld which included sexual harrassment, gender related discrimination and constructive dismissal. Some of the claims she made, besides that she was named `Crazy Miss Cokehead`, was that she was sent a raft of abusive emails, her boss had said she had an "unfortunate natural brain chemistry", she had been accused of being a drug addict, and all her complaints had been totally ignored.
The scale of the victimisation led to her being forced to go off sick in January 2012 and she resigned altogether in April 2012.
The moral of this story, if you are an employer, is to ensure that you have a zero tolerance against any offensive or denigrating behavior and that you always take any claims by an employee seriously and follow them up. The fact that in this case they did not and that the managers were also involved with this offensive behavior led to the employment tribunal awarding such a large payout.
If you are planning on claiming compensation for unfair dismissal or you need legal help in any other area of employment law check out Gus Campbell Solicitors who can give you advice on how to proceed.
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