A banker was sacked by bailed-out Royal Bank of Scotland for spending thousands of pounds on lavish meals, nightclubbing and hotels using his company credit card, a London employment tribunal heard today.
Oleksiy Nesterenko, who earned £94,000 a year in the global banking and markets division, racked up nearly £4,000 debts on the firm’s card after he ran out of credit on his own.
Despite paying the money back, he was suspended then sacked for gross misconduct. Today, after a four-day hearing at central London employment tribunal, his unfair dismissal claim was rejected.
The tribunal heard that he used the company card to pay for a flight in Russia, a hotel in Egypt and hundreds of pounds worth of meals and nightclub bills.
He was repeatedly warned but carried on his spending spree, even using the card to get an “interest-free loan” by paying for a meal for friends, who then gave him the cash back.
He claimed he was led by colleagues to believe the practice was “common” and “tolerated” at RBS, which received £163 billion loans from the taxpayer at the height of the banking crisis. Judge David Pearl said: “It has become clear he never drew these matters to his manager’s attention.
“Although this does give rise to an inference of dishonesty it is just plausible that the claimant was burying his head in the sand and refusing to acknowledge the difficulties in which he was beginning to immerse himself.
“By using the corporate credit card, the advantage to him was that he was able to get credit at a time when his own credit cards had been barred.”
*Bankers could be told to retrain or even banned from working in the City if found guilty of misconduct or failures, under plans for a new body to oversee financial institutions proposed by George Osborne today.
