February 20, 2012
A top Cambridge scientist has been awarded £30,000 in damages after being the target of a “barrage of yelling” from a colleague.
Dr Andrew Faulkner, 57, resigned from his job at Manchester University after a meeting in which Professor Mohammed Missous, who worked with Dr Faulkner at the university, subjected him to a verbal assault.
A tribunal heard how Prof. Missous had “leapt out of his chair” and was ''unbelievably unpleasant” to Dr Faulkner during a meeting about research at the Jodrell Bank observatory in Cheshire.
On being told that he could call the doctor with any queries, he also shouted: ''It's not the done thing for a professor to call a research assistant” and accused Dr Faulkner of being ''a subordinate who had over stepped the mark."
Faulkner complained of being “frozen out” of further meetings and resigned from his post in August 2008. He won a settlement for unfair dismissal in 2009, but the Court of Appeal later ordered a retrial after finding that there had been flaws in the original hearing.
But this week the doctor received a new verdict of unfair and constructive dismissal and was awarded damages of £29,557.23.
The judge said: ''We do not accept the respondent's contention that the meeting was an argument between mature and passionate people which was clumsily handled.
''On the contrary, we accept the claimant's evidence that it was a completely unacceptable meeting which wholly overstepped the boundary of what can be considered to be proper behaviour.''
Dr Faulkner, who was part of a team responsible for designing the Square Kilometre Array, a new telescope array set to be the world’s most powerful when completed in 2020, said: “I'm deeply disappointed with the treatment of employees by Manchester University. The University must have spent a lot of public money on the whole process yet has not disciplined those professors to my knowledge.
''My lawyer tells me that these cases are hard to win at tribunal, so I am especially delighted at the result - even if I have had to fight this at my own expense.”
