A used car salesman went on a sunny holiday in Portugal without leave and met a company director at a bar, the Workplace Relations Commission said, reports RTE.
In a complaint under the Unfair Dismissal Act 1977, Gary Maloney alleged Bill Griffin Motors Ltd summarily dismissed him within five minutes of returning to work on Monday, October 17, 2022, when he claimed he was told to hand over his laptop and leave the location.
“I didn’t get a yes, I didn’t get a no,” he said of his annual leave request the week of October 10 in July the previous year, adding that the company’s sales director told him: “Ah, it should be okay,” reports RTE.
A sales executive said he never approved a leave request because he wanted the entire sales team to be at work while he and another executive attended a family wedding.
“We were just left in a lurch,” said sales director David Griffin, who said the salesman simply failed to turn up for work without any communication.
“We’d a lot of customers trying to ring Gary. We got a lot of complaints, and one large cancelled sale, a €60,000 [Volvo] XC90 that Gary had sold,” Mr Griffin said, reports RTE.
Griffin said Maloney left 20 car sales bookings and “a huge amount of leads” behind.
Maloney travelled to Albufeira on Portugal’s Algarve coast, where the Griffin family was to be married later this week.
In evidence, Robert Griffin, another director who attended the family wedding, said Mr Maloney approached him at the bar and asked, “Uh, is Dave here?” – a gesture of deception, which the firm’s lawyer later described as a “hiding” gesture.
“He [knew] he shouldn’t have been there, he should have been in work,” the witness said of the salesman’s disposition, reports RTE.
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