Source : THE AGE NEWS
It’s been quite a year for Slater and Gordon, its new boss Dina Tutungi, and her 900-odd colleagues at a firm that built its fortunes on workers’ rights and class actions.
Her 12 months in the top job have seen a police investigation, fraud allegations, an underpayment scandal, wrongful dismissal claims, and an incendiary case of sabotage delivered via internal email this February.
The latter revealed sensitive pay details and salacious gossip on the office politics at a law firm tapped into the corridors of Melbourne’s business and political elite.
Slater and Gordon has engaged external advisors as part of an investigation into who sent the incendiary email with pay information to current and former staff.Credit: Paul Jeffers
Let’s start with the events on a Friday morning in February when the explosive emails were sent to 900 current and former employees.
It contained a mishmash of pay details and bonuses, performance ratings, investigations into inappropriate conduct and grumblings that its private equity owners were about to “gut the place”.
The emails purported to come from the law firm’s temporary HR boss, Mari Ruiz-Matthyssen, on her last day at the firm before taking a permanent role at Hume Bank in March.
Her legal action against Slater and Gordon details the chaos that ensued that Friday. Within minutes, Ruiz-Matthyssen was fielding calls from other staff assuming she’d sent the email. This included the firm’s CEO, Tutungi, who said Ruiz-Matthyssen “had to go” and abruptly hung up, according to court documents.
Ruiz-Matthyssen’s access to the firm’s systems was revoked within the hour despite her protestations of innocence, a stated intention to report the matter to the Victorian Police, and enough evidence to suggest an insider with access to specific systems was to blame.
A chain of circumstantial evidence pointed the finger at one particular former insider, according to Ruiz-Matthyssen’s case, but let’s get to that later.
It was not until after 4pm that the firm put out a statement backing Ruiz-Matthyssen’s assertion that she did not write or send the email. By then, her name had already been reported in the press as the author.
Ruiz-Matthyssen’s job at Hume Bank fell through and she is now seeking damages from Slater and Gordon.
The law firm does not deny her innocence and presumably its defence in the legal battle will be that its response was reasonable under trying circumstances.
So, who is to blame?
In March, the Australian Financial Review reported that the firm’s former payroll officer, Bridgett Maddox, happened to be a convicted serial fraudster.
“I uncovered an underpayment and my life was ruined as a result. I did nothing wrong.”
Bridgett Maddox
In 2018, under her former name Bridgett Jones, she was in jail for fraud against one employer and was back before the courts for defrauding another employer where she worked as its payroll and accounts manager.
The presiding judge warned Jones/Maddox would be “dragged back to court and re-sentenced” if she was caught so much as “knocking off a box of matches from Woolworths”.
At Slater and Gordon, Maddox had access to the information shared via email, and, according to Ruiz-Matthyssen’s statement of claim, Maddox had accessed Slater and Gordon’s computer systems the day after she was suspended by the firm over a $200 voucher.
But Maddox is protesting her innocence.
Former Slater and Gordon employee and convicted fraudster Bridgett Maddox has been linked to two scandals which have hit the firm.
“I uncovered an underpayment and my life was ruined as a result. I did nothing wrong,” Maddox told this publication via text this week.
Now, the underpayments scandal. Slater and Gordon is in a legal battle with another former HR boss, Alicia Gleeson, who was dismissed last year over the scandal in which she says she had helped bring to a close.
According to Gleeson’s statement of claim, in May 2023, she had been in the job for only months when a payroll team member discovered that Slater and Gordon may have been underpaying its staff over the previous decade. That person was Bridgett Maddox.
The two of them raised the issue with Tutungi and were closely involved as it was escalated to the firm’s board last year – estimates of the amounts involved ballooned to $340,000.
More critically, according to the court documents, Gleeson told Tutungi in June last year she believed the underpayments were “deliberate and systemic”.
She also said Maddox and other payroll staff felt “victimised and targeted” by the investigation conducted by the firm’s risk team and “feared losing their jobs.”
At the end of July, Gleeson lost her job.
Tutungi called her into a meeting and sacked her for misleading the board about the underpayments and “intentionally delaying or deferring” remediation, according to court documents.
Slater and Gordon denied Gleeson’s allegations.
Let’s pick up the thread by going back to Ruiz-Matthyssen’s court action, lodged last week.
According to her statement of claim, which refers to circumstantial evidence suggesting Maddox is the email sender, concerns were raised about Maddox’s conduct in October last year – including a $200 Prezzee gift voucher Maddox improperly “allocated” to herself.
As the acting HR boss, Ruiz-Matthyssen says she oversaw the matter just weeks after joining Slater and Gordon.
Maddox was formally suspended in early November and was effectively sacked the next month. The February email claimed she had been paid out tens of thousands of dollars.
Strangely, Slater and Gordon claims it did not know about Maddox’s criminal past until March this year, and insiders say there is no other indication of her engaging in fraud while at the firm. This means she was effectively sacked over the $200 gift voucher.
This is despite court documents showing Steve Palmer, who was counsel for ex-Victorian premier Daniel Andrews and is now an adviser to Slater and Gordon, referring to Maddox as having a “criminal mind” while talking with Ruiz-Matthyssen about the voucher issue.
Mari Ruiz-Matthyssen, Slater and Gordon temporary HR boss.
In March, Slater and Gordon effectively washed its hands of the email debacle, saying it had referred the outcomes of its investigation to Victoria Police.
If you want to know what headway the police are making with the matter, a spokesman this week repeated its previous statement: “Cybercrime detectives are continuing to assess the limited information provided by the complainant regarding this matter.”
It doesn’t sound promising, and appears to confirm allegations in Ruiz-Matthyssen’s statement of claim that flaws in Slater and Gordon’s cybersecurity meant the firm’s IT department could not work out whether Maddox had uploaded any confidential information after her suspension.
It raises questions of whether any insider could have accessed the information without detection.
There is also the privacy breach for hundreds of staff who only need to read their own marketing material to know what options they have: “If a company that holds your data has failed to take reasonable steps to protect your personal information, you may be eligible for compensation,” says the Slater and Gordon website.
Dina Tutungi CEO Slater & Gordon Lawyers.
The two legal battles with Slater and Gordon’s former HR bosses may be the only practical avenue for digging into what actually happened with both scandals and whether current insiders were at fault.
But they probably won’t answer two important questions: how Maddox was employed in such a sensitive role at a law firm without a criminal history check? And why was she effectively sacked over a $200 voucher?
Watching closely will be Slater and Gordon’s trophy board, led by James Mackenzie, a corporate heavyweight with strong government ties on the boards of WorkSafe Victoria, the Victorian Funds Management Corp., Development Victoria, and the Suburban Rail Loop Authority.
As for Maddox, she continues to claim she has turned over a new leaf.
“I’ve done nothing wrong for over a decade and have spent the last seven years working incredibly hard to build a life I was proud of—until that was undone by headlines more focused on sensationalism than truth.”
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