Mr Williams was technical director of Leeds United FC ("LUFC"), with duties that included identifying and nurturing young talent on the football field. LUFC decided to make him redundant and were aware of his 12 month notice period and his salary of £200,000. So they embarked on a search to find any reason they could to justify instant dismissal...
...and struck gold, finding an email with pornographic images attached that he had sent to a male friend outside LUFC from his work email account five years earlier. They dismissed him and rejected his appeal. Some time later, it was found that he had sent the email to two others, one female club employee and one male friend outside the club.
What carried more weight with the court? The clear intention of LUFC to breach its contract with Mr Williams anyway and to further its financial interests by paying him nothing - in which case the email's discovery would have been an irrelevant and undeserved windfall only fit to be ignored - or the inherent gross misconduct nature of the email, its late discovery having only served to leave Mr Williams on borrowed time until it saw the light of day?
Evidently the latter. The High Court sided with LUFC. Regardless of the fact that his sending of the email lay undiscovered for over 5 years, it was a sufficiently serious breach of the duty of implied trust and confidence as to amount to a repudiatory breach of contract. LUFC were entitled to accept it as such in justification of his summary dismissal on 30 July 2013.
Every such case is going to turn on its own facts, of course. But it is a salutary lesson for any employee who might think that there is any water under the bridge factor for undiscovered gross misconduct.
Williams v Leeds United Football Club [2015] EWHC 376 (QB): full judgment here: -
http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/2015/376.html
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