Food Hub Paid £61k After Staging Shah’s Dismissal

A Birmingham employment tribunal awarded Tanveer Shah £61,419.50 after Food Hub Limited restaged a chief executive’s on-the-spot sacking as a fair disciplinary.

Ardian Mula, the chief executive and principal shareholder, accused the UK field sales manager of stealing a salary. The panel left the Egypt weeks unresolved and still found the rebuilt process was a sham.

Mula Sacked Him in a Catch-Up Meeting

Shah joined the Stoke-on-Trent takeaway app in 2018 as a field sales executive. Mula had hired him once before, in 2013, for an Egypt call-centre job at a related business called ADS, and agreed to take him on again in the United Kingdom so long as he worked with both halal and haram client businesses.

He did well. About August 2020 he became regional field account manager, running four or five executives. In July 2021, after Mohammed Risalat left as head of sales, he was promoted to UK field sales manager. Mula thought it was a big step and still backed it, the panel found, because Shah was a high performer.

The job then changed shape. After a slump in new restaurant sign-ups, Jackie Sims, the interim managing director, held a trial-period review with Mula on 12 January 2022. The written summary told Shah to spend 80% of his time in the field shadowing his team. Shah later said that instruction was new and that it lapsed when Sims left. The tribunal accepted it was new. It did not accept that it had quietly died.

Simon Farmer took over as line manager in January 2022 and, with Mula, learned Shah was in Egypt with family, not on authorised leave. In February, Farmer found the company car had gone back to the dealer and no replacement had been bought. On 14 March 2022, James Page, senior HR business partner, met Shah intending to suspend him. Shah said he had just bought a car that weekend. Page took that at face value, put £300 in as a fuel float, and wrote that refusing to be field based at least four or five days a week could be gross misconduct.

On 1 August 2022 Mula went through the previous month’s expenses looking for a spike and instead found Shah’s claims far lower than the rest of his team. For a national role he had expected the opposite. A WhatsApp note called the next day’s meeting a catch up. It was not.

On 2 August 2022 Shah sat with Mula and Farmer. Mula believed the receipts showed only six or seven nights away in three months, asked how many of the last 60 days Shah had spent in the field, and got no number back. Shah argued he did not need to be in the field to do the job. Mula, angry about pay for work he thought had not been done, accused him of “stealing money from the company” and “illegitimately taking a salary,” then dismissed him for gross misconduct on the spot.

The panel rejected Shah’s claim that this was an old Egypt grudge. A chief executive who wanted him gone, it said, would not have hired him in 2018 or backed two promotions. The reason for the explosion was Mula’s belief that Shah was, in effect, stealing.

An Appeal, Then Immediate Suspension

Page told Mula he should have followed a proper process. The tribunal thought Page went further and warned that a tribunal would find the sacking unfair. Shah’s appeal email of 5 August 2022, sent to Page, called the catch up an unceremonious dumping after almost five years and said he would not accept gross misconduct.

The same day’s dismissal letter listed three charges: being untruthful about being field based, refusing a reasonable request to work with teams and clients face to face, and working from home or another place rather than in the field. Neil Sturrock, then global operations director, chaired the appeal on 12 August 2022, with Page taking notes. It resumed on 15 August.

Sturrock revoked the dismissal for failure to follow procedure, then said he would investigate whether Shah had been doing the job and would suspend him while that ran. The tribunal called that an unusual appeal. An appeal officer who thinks a sacking is unsafe might decide the charge, or finish the extra enquiries, before ruling. Sturrock said he was protecting the business and giving Shah a fair hearing. The panel found the first reason drove the result.

A suspension letter went on 16 August 2022. It said suspension was necessary and gave no reasons. Two investigation interviews followed, with Page asking the questions while Sturrock, still named as investigating officer, took notes. Shah pointed out that Page should have given Sturrock the file first. The panel agreed. Sturrock, it found, was investigator in name only.

THE MONTH THAT RELABELLED A SACKING

1. 12 January 2022: Trial review tells Shah to spend 80% of his time in the field.
2. 14 March 2022: Page meets him to suspend him, accepts a same-day car purchase, and warns that staying out of the field can be gross misconduct.
3. 2 August 2022: Mula sacks him on the spot for gross misconduct after an expenses review.
4. 15 August 2022: Sturrock allows the appeal, reinstates him, and suspends him the same day.
5. 7 September 2022: A second dismissal, this time with notice, takes effect after a hearing chaired by a new director.

No investigation report was ever written. Sturrock, who said he had run many disciplinaries, could not explain why. He spoke of a handover to Page. His own witness statement said he had no further role after writing to Shah, and the panel found there was no handover.

Why Shah Won Despite the Egypt Evidence

Shah’s claim over his unfair sacking for Egypt remote work went to a full merits hearing in Birmingham on 24, 25, 26, 27 and 28 February and 3 March 2025. He appeared in person. Food Hub instructed Ms Chan of counsel. Employment Judge Maxwell sat with Mr Howard and Mr Spencer.

The Egypt weeks sat in the background, not in the live file. After Farmer joined, Mula and Farmer discovered Shah was in Egypt. In interview Shah said he had gone on holiday, caught Covid, and could not fly back. He agreed there was a period of remote work from there and could not say whether it lasted days, a week, or several weeks. The panel called that a surprising gap, given the company expected him in the United Kingdom.

Food Hub later produced IP logs, obtained after the dismissal, which it said put him in Egypt for several weeks. Shah said the same logs showed him in Cairo or London on sequential days, which he argued made them unreliable because he was not flying back and forth. He lives in Wales, not London. From a point in February 2022, when it was common ground he was back in the UK, the same tools showed logins from various UK locations, which would fit field travel. The panel said the company’s VPN explanation for the Cairo-London pattern seemed most likely, and that the IP material cannot have informed any decision taken at the time.

What the company did run was a fuel-card and expenses case about 2022 field time. Page built a spreadsheet, then a second one after Shah brought seven fuel-card receipts the first sheet had missed. Page said archives had now been checked and that some figures excluded VAT and fuel duty. He still did not hand over the underlying card-company statements, to Shah or to the tribunal. Shah had also used the £300 float and said local running costs were £40 or £50 a week, with unpaid street parking near clients. Page said £300 would not last five weeks.

The panel found there were reasonable grounds on which some employers could have believed the charge, namely that Shah had been told to work in the field four days out of five and had not done so. Other reasonable employers, it said, might have trusted him, treated missing receipts as unsurprising when fuel cards need no expense claim, and found the fuel evidence too weak. It called the case borderline. Dismissal, if the charge had been fairly proved, would have sat in the range of reasonable responses, because Page’s March letter had already labelled a failure to be field based as gross misconduct. Shah had long and previously unblemished service, and a warning rather than a sacking was also open.

The claim still succeeded. Belief and a borderline evidential case do not cure an investigation the panel found was aimed at one outcome.

Green Had Been in Post for Three Weeks

Joanna Green, then director of quality and organisational development, chaired the disciplinary on 30 August and 1 September 2022. She was three weeks into her probation. Page presented the management case. Her own line manager, Sturrock, was the named investigator whose findings she was asked to try.

Green told the meeting she would ask Page to present, question both men after each piece of evidence, and let Shah answer. In practice Page kept asking the questions, including about fuel fills before and after leave, then offered to hand back to “Jo.” Shah had annotated the spreadsheet and sent receipts overnight. Page said he could validate some of them and still produced no source statements.

Green’s letter said the charge was proved and ended employment with notice from Wednesday, 7 September 2022. Shah had a right of appeal and did not use it. The panel did not criticise that. By then, it said, he had no good reason to think a further internal round would be any fairer.

Green, the panel accepted, probably did believe Shah was guilty. She did not reach that view free of Mula, Page, or Sturrock. Anything other than dismissal would have overturned her line manager and the chief executive. Asked whether Mula would have been unhappy if she had let Shah return, she was evasive. The tribunal found her evidence that this never crossed her mind most unrealistic.

Page was involved from the first sacking through the appeal, the investigation, the case-to-answer letter sent in Sturrock’s name, and the disciplinary. He was not called as a witness. The panel found he orchestrated the second process to achieve, in a form he hoped a tribunal would defend, the outcome Mula had already decided.

Window-Dressing From Start to Finish

Direct and indirect religious discrimination claims failed. So did breach of contract. The unfair dismissal claim succeeded. On the public tribunal register for the case, the reserved liability judgment is dated 9 April 2025.

Sadly, we have come to the conclusion that the process followed by the Respondent was an exercise in window-dressing. In short, the process was not a genuine one undertaken in good faith. On the contrary, it was orchestrated to achieve a predetermined outcome.

Employment Judge Maxwell, Birmingham Employment Tribunal, reserved judgment

The steps after 2 August 2022 had, the panel said, the superficial appearance of fairness: an appeal allowed, an investigation, a suspension, two interviews, a case to answer, a hearing before a different manager, a second dismissal. Nobody who touched those steps did so in a fair, independent, open-minded way.

WHAT THE PANEL SAID WENT WRONG

• The named investigator: Sturrock did not run the inquiry in practice, and that was misrepresented to Shah.
• The fuel file: Page looked only for material that supported the charge and never produced complete card-company statements, which no reasonable employer would have skipped when dismissal was on the table.
• The decision-maker: Green, three weeks into probation, was not a remotely appropriate chair when her line manager was presenting the case for sacking.
• The aim: Page had seen that Mula’s first dismissal would almost certainly be found unfair and set about organising a process that would appear fair while achieving the same result.

On remedy, the same panel applied a 25% Acas uplift. Tribunals can adjust awards by up to 25% where a party unreasonably fails to follow the Acas Code of Practice on disciplinary procedures. Citing the Employment Appeal Tribunal in Rentplus UK Ltd v Coulson, Maxwell’s panel said a predetermined sham is no better for the employee than no process at all, and is not compliance with the Code.

It also found a 25% chance that a genuinely fair process would still have ended in dismissal, being a 50% chance the charge would have been upheld and a 50% chance that, if it were, the sanction would still have been dismissal. That finding sat in the liability reasons. It did not appear as a cut to the pounds in the remedy judgment, because losses plus the uplift were already through the cap.

The Award Hit £61,419.50 at the Cap

The remedy hearing was on 17 and 18 July 2025. Shah’s net pay had been £44,690.40 a year, or £859.43 a week. After 7 September 2022 he went six weeks and a day before a stent was fitted on 20 October 2022. The panel would not find, without a cardiologist, that Food Hub caused that illness. It did find he would have been off on sick pay, and that Mula, tight on expenses, would probably not have topped statutory sick pay up to full salary. From 1 February 2023 Shah applied for work, including at competitors. Interviews cooled, he said, when he told them he had been dismissed and was in tribunal. By the remedy hearing he was still out of work, with later fit notes for low mood, then depression, then anxiety and depression, and he was considering retraining. The panel found the unemployment, which flowed from the dismissal, was the main cause of that decline, and that Food Hub had not shown a failure to mitigate.

Past wage loss to 26 March 2024 already came to £58,670.05 once a £500 sum for loss of statutory rights was included. A 25% uplift on that figure is £73,337.56, above the cap the parties agreed.

THE TRIBUNAL’S AWARD

The compensatory award of £58,850 is the statutory cap the parties agreed, not a full run of future loss. Car allowance and tax grossing-up were left undecided for the same reason: they would only have pushed the figure further past the limit. The remedy judgment is dated 18 July 2025.

Food Hub Limited, company 10619783, remains active at 55a Duke Street, Stoke-on-Trent. A Foodhub listing dated 30 September 2026 for a senior field operations manager still asked for extensive UK travel to restaurant partners.

Frequently Asked Questions

How Much Did the Tribunal Award Tanveer Shah?

The total was £61,419.50, and the parties also agreed a separate £500 for loss of statutory rights inside the loss calculation that then hit the cap. Future loss from 27 March 2024 was never quantified, because the 25% Acas uplift on losses already assessed took the prospective compensatory figure to £73,337.56, above the agreed £58,850 limit.

Did the Tribunal Find Shah Was Working From Egypt?

It did not make a finding of weeks in Cairo as a proved fact that decided the claim. The IP logs were gathered after dismissal, so they could not have driven the live decisions, and the panel treated a VPN as the most likely explanation for logins that appeared in Cairo and London on consecutive days while Shah was living in Wales.

What Happened to Shah’s Other Claims?

Direct and indirect religious discrimination were dismissed, as was breach of contract, because the second dismissal on 7 September 2022 was with notice. The panel found both men sincere about their Muslim faith and held that Mula sacked Shah because he believed unpaid field work was theft, not because of religion, clothing, or the 2013 Egypt menu dispute.

What Is an Acas 25% Uplift?

Section 207A of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 lets a tribunal move a relevant award up or down by up to 25% for unreasonable failure to follow the Acas Code, and in ordinary unfair dismissal that adjustment bites on the compensatory award only, not the basic award. Twenty-five per cent is the top of the range, used here because the panel found bad faith rather than a clumsy attempt at a real process.

What Is the Case Reference and Who Appeared?

The claim number is 1309075/2022. Shah represented himself throughout; Food Hub appeared through Ms Chan; the liability bundle ran to page 918; and the GOV.UK register was first published on 13 August 2025, with the reserved liability judgment added on 19 September 2025.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting on a published employment tribunal judgment and is for information only. It is not legal advice, is not a guide to bringing or defending a claim, and should not be treated as a template for any disciplinary, appeal, or settlement decision. Anyone facing a live workplace dispute should take advice from a qualified employment solicitor, an authorised adviser, or Acas before acting. The figures, dates, and findings here reflect the Shah v Food Hub Limited judgments as published on GOV.UK and may be changed by any later appeal or correction.

Mula called the missing field days theft. Page then built a second process to make that call look lawful. The bill, once the Acas uplift cleared the cap, was £61,419.50.