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The consumer-owned electricity company Energi Danmark is being sued by three former employees, write Finans.dk. The demand is for 900 million Danish kroner, which corresponds to 1.4 billion Norwegian kroner after today’s mug.
It is the Danmarks Jurist- og Økonomiforbund (Djøf) that has summoned Energi Danmark to the Danish court. According to the newspaper, they are demanding the payment of three-figure million bonuses to the three former employees.
The court confirms that they have received a summons on 27 June.
The three employees lost their jobs after the large bonuses became known, but believe that the agreements are still valid and that Energi Danmark must pay out the bonuses.
– We have subpoenaed Energi Danmark on behalf of a member of Djøf, says lawyer Frederik Brocks, who will lead the case for Djøf and the energy traders.
According to Brocks, the trial itself will only apply to one of the former employees of the company, but the same issue will apply to all three, the lawyer points out to Finans.dk.
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Refuses to pay out bonuses
It was at the end of April that the consumer-owned electricity company Energi Danmark announced that it had chosen to suspend three traders who had accumulated bonuses of between 250 and 300 million Danish kroner during last year, corresponding to between 375 and 450 million Norwegian kroner.
Energi Danmark has refused to pay out the bonuses, and stated that the bonus agreements with the three were entered into by the company’s former CEO without the board knowing anything about them.
At the beginning of May, it became known that the three traders had been fired. The company justified the dismissal by saying that it had experienced a “serious breach of trust” as a result of several disloyal actions on the part of the employees.
«Collective pressure»
It was the Danish website finans.dk that first revealed the enormous bonuses that were to accrue to the three employees, one of whom will sit on Energi Danmark’s corporate management.
The bonus scheme must have been a kind of share purchase agreement, which, according to the company, was “a result of the employees’ collective pressure/coercion”. The agreement must have been negotiated with the then managing director after coordination among the three employees, where the draft of the agreement was written by one employee.
On 30 July 2021, all three employees must have resigned from their positions and informed the CEO via a joint email. At the same time, they informed that they would announce a transfer to Norlys Energy Trading, but that the dismissals would only take effect if Energi Danmark did not match the terms the employees stated they had received from the competitor.
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The now-departed CEO Jørgen Holm Wester will then offer them a similar agreement with Energi Danmark, which, according to the company’s board, he did not have a mandate to do.
“Such collective pressure is a breach of the employees’ duty of loyalty to Energi Danmark and is not legal”, stated Energi Danmark in a press release in May.
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Furthermore, Energi Danmark believes that the negotiator, i.e. one of the three employees, was aware that the CEO was acting outside his mandate. (Terms) Copyright Dagens Næringsliv AS and/or our suppliers. We would like you to share our cases using links, which lead directly to our pages. Copying or other forms of use of all or part of the content may only take place with written permission or as permitted by law. For further terms see here.
2023-07-04 12:00:00
#Energy #traders #suing #employer #billion
