Court Dismisses Crisson’s Claim Against Crisson
The Supreme Court has dismissed a claim brought by Andrew Lundin Crisson against his former employer, H.S. & J.E. Crisson Limited, saying the “claim fails in its entirety.”
The Supreme Court judgment [PDF] said, “This is my judgment following the trial of a claim brought by Andrew Lundin Crisson [the Plaintiff] against his former employer, H.S. & J.E. Crisson Limited [the Company], a family-owned Bermuda retailer of jewellery and watches which was founded over a hundred years ago.
“The Plaintiff’s case, in essence, was that his employment with the Company was terminated by the Company on 30 January 2022, that the resignation letters he signed that day do not reflect a genuine and voluntary decision on his part to relinquish his employment, and that he was not paid his wages during the period from December 2019 to January 2022.
“The Company’s position was that the Plaintiff voluntarily resigned, in writing, from both his directorship and his employment at a board meeting on 30 January 2022, and that no further sums are due to him. In the alternative, the Company contended that if it be found the Plaintiff did not resign, it had just cause to terminate his employment in any event.
The court judgment also noted the “entanglement of his personal finances with the Company’s own to the point of threatening its solvency,” and said “by December 2019 the Company’s banking relationship with its bankers had come under serious strain. This was as a direct result of the Plaintiff’s own financial position.
“Absent resolution, the Company faced a real prospect of being unable to meet payroll. This is corroborated by the Company’s own contemporaneous financial correspondence.”
The judgment noted, “The pressure the Plaintiff says he was under was the ordinary and legitimate consequence of the Company’s directors responding to a real commercial threat. That was the bank’s threat to close the Company’s accounts, which came about because of the Plaintiff’s own financial conduct.”
The court also heard that in 2022, the “Plaintiff asked the Company to ‘look at the organizational structure and try to find a job for me’ acknowledging this might require reducing staff, and stating ‘I am 58, and will find it difficult to find any other work” and “asked ‘to rescind the resignation’, itself an acknowledgment that a resignation had occurred, not a denial of it.”
The ruling, from Justice Jeffrey Elkinson, stated, “Having heard the evidence and considered the documentary record, I have concluded that the Plaintiff’s claim fails in its entirety.”
