The former chief technical officer of artificial intelligence start-up Altada has secured an order for €10,000 over an “illegal” cut to his pay in the months before the company went into receivership in late 2022.
The award is just over one-fifth of the sum sought by the former executive, Denis Canty, in a claim under the Payment of Wages Act 1991 against his former employer, Altada Technology Solutions Ltd, which was rescued from receivership in January 2023.
The Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) said it would not consider Mr Canty’s further claim of about €39,000 connected to an unpaid bonus.
Neither the company nor its receivers, Grant Thornton, were represented at a hearing into the complaint last October, when Mr Canty accused Altada of making an “unlawful” 22.5% deduction from his €125,000-a-year salary.
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Some staff at the technology start-up were put on lay-off in July 2022, with the rest subjected to a “unilateral” pay cut, Mr Canty told the tribunal.
In July, when the first month of this deduction was in force, Mr Canty did not even get the full amount of the reduced sum due to him, the tribunal noted.
His evidence was that he continued to receive his reduced salary until October 2022, when it ceased completely. Mr Canty said Altada went into receivership on November 4th that year and that he resigned just over three weeks later.
It was a “tumultuous” period which “did not abate” during the receivership process, Mr Canty told the tribunal.
He said he thought the receivership would “address all personal debt owed to him” and that he learned from the receivers only in the last week of April 2023 that he would have to make a separate WRC claim.
By then more than six months had passed since the initial pay cut, the tribunal noted, moving the claim outside the usual deadline for filing a WRC complaint.
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Mr Canty’s position was that he acted to file his claim “as soon as he was notified” of the approach being taken by the receivers.
However, adjudicator Patsy Doyle ruled that Mr Canty had demonstrated “reasonable cause” for it to extend its jurisdiction beyond the normal six-month time limit after the complainant described the “storm and stress” of participating in the receivership process.
Ms Doyle noted a 28 April 2023 letter from the receivers provided by Mr Canty, showing that they intended to claim arrears in staff wages and annual leave from the Department of Social Protection’s insolvency payments scheme.
However, in the same letter, the receivers told staff that any sum they were seeking in relation to the cuts to their wages would have to go to the WRC for adjudication, as the Department of Social Protection had said those issues would be rejected in an insolvency claim.
On foot of Mr Canty’s uncontroverted evidence that the pay cut was “unilateral”, Ms Doyle ruled that there had been an “illegal deduction in his wages by 22.5 per cent over the months of July, August and September 2022″.
She ruled further that there was a further “deficiency” in his wages for July – ordering the company to pay the executive €10,238.01.
However, she found that Mr Canty could not pursue a claim worth around €39,000 over an unpaid bonus, because he had not mentioned it in his original statutory complaint.
Mr Canty is the second senior ex-Altada employee to secure compensation under the Payment of Wages Act following awards last month totalling €24,262 to Graham Baitson, the firm’s former global head of emerging technology.
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