The ethical channel of a company received a complaint alleging possible unfair competition by an employee. The client company is one of the leading companies in the healthcare sector.
The client company is one of the leading companies in the healthcare sector. They requested our assistance in trying to verify the complaint received about unfair competition actions against a director of one of its clinics.
The employee under investigation was on reduced working hours for childcare. Specifically, he had been working 30 hours per week since 2016. At the beginning of 2018, he again requested to reduce his working hours to only 20 hours per week. The company suspected that these reduced working hours could be related to the employee's work activities outside the client's company, actions that would represent unfair competition with the clinic.
Through the investigation carried out by Grupo Paradell, we were able to discover that the employee was actually using the reduced working hours to manage and work in another clinic, which also happened to be run by a company whose sole administrator was the sister of the person under investigation. These actions constituted an abuse of rights and an improper use of the leave contained in the law. Furthermore, it should be borne in mind that these activities would potentially constitute unfair competition, which in itself would be grounds for dismissal, as they were carried out without authorisation or prior information or notice to the company.
The controls carried out by Grupo Paradell were also able to verify that after the request for 2 days for the hospitalisation of a family member, one of the 2 days was spent the whole day at the other establishment carrying out all kinds of work activities.
The employee never informed the company of his activities outside the company. The Court in its judgement states that even in case of doubt, he should have informed his employer in advance of all matters.
With the help of the report made by Grupo Paradell, the client made a fair dismissal. Following a lawsuit by the employee, the dismissal was upheld by the courts. The court declared that there had been a breach of trust by the employee.