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Employees who worked for corporations run by a well-known Welsh businessman say they are still owed thousands of pounds years after they finished their jobs. Workers from i4 Technology Group Ltd and Broadband Infrastructure Company Ltd, who have installed broadband in the communities, say they have not. They won the amounts they had been awarded through the labour courts for the past two years.
The largest of these awards is in excess of £65,000 and includes claims for breach of contract, unfair dismissal and unlawful deductions from wages. Several employees, several of whom spoke to WalesOnline, say they are still looking for the cash years after the court rulings were handed down. fact.
The two companies that have been the subject of an unfavourable ruling are related to Elfed Wyn Thomas, a well-known businessman founded in North Wales, once considered a millionaire and mastermind of a number of fibre optic broadband companies in the UK. Colwyn Bay, Thomas, who is now 64, was in the past chief executive of H20 NEtworks, which delivered the UK’s first fibre-to-the-home networks in Bournemouth and Dundee in the 2000s.
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He has been given the prestigious name of Ernst Entrepreneur.
Many of the workers who have worked at Mr. Thomas in recent years now claim that they have not been able to receive the thousands of pounds they have been awarded by the employment tribunals in recent years. Alan Walker, 59, had worked in the broadband industry. since 2017 and was laid off from a major fibre optic broadband provider shortly before the pandemic. In January 2020, he contacted Elfed Thomas, who showed up to meet him at a hotel near Manchester and who allegedly introduced him to a position as a business progression manager at his company Broadband Infrastructure Company Limited. Thomas was Director of Broadband Infrastructure until December 2022 and there is lately an active proposal to remove the company from the Companies House list.
When Walker first visited the company’s Menai Park office, he said he was “shocked at how empty it was,” adding, “There were only a few people running there,” Elfed added. Walker’s paintings were delayed due to the pandemic. And when it finally started in July 2020, he claimed it was “obvious there was no cash to back up the promises” made regarding the company’s broadband launch. “I was one of the four salesmen,” Elfed had told us. that the company might be offering only a 1GB stream and had a goal of launching new innovations from 20 to 30 homes and integrating our generation on-site.
“I don’t know how I was going to get the money back. I emailed someone else at the company asking about the price I was going to offer to potential consumers and they gave me products that didn’t include 1GB. “At the end of his first month, Mr. Walker claims that he was not paid and adds that when he was paid a few weeks later, the amount was incorrect. He claims that he was never paid on time afterwards. ” It was chaos the whole time. “he said.
When England entered their second lockdown in November, coinciding with the end of the lockdown in Wales, Sanchez Walker was given a five-month leave. He claims that he said he would get five tickets for that period, but that he only won two. In January 2021, he became even more involved when he contacted the pension fund to which his employer intended to pay his contributions and claimed that they had no record of him.
“I did some studies in January and got in touch with our retirement company Nest, which had never heard of us. I asked Elfed where the cash was for my pension and simply told him I had to fix it. My license and pension had just disappeared.
“In February 2021, we thought we would go back to work. Then I got an email with a copy of a letter [in March] informing me that I was going to be laid off because the company might no longer pay me. “
After attempting to recover some of the money owed to him through the firm, Mr. Walker engaged with a lawyer and managed to land a hard labor tribunal, which found in January 2022 that Broadband Infrastructure Company Limited had deducted his salary for his pension. but never paid them to the pension company Nest. It also showed that Mr. Walker disclosed that he had never been granted a pension.
The court also found that Mr. Walker had never received an employment contract despite his claims, that his wages were unpaid or paid late, and that he “occasionally obtained lump sums without any reference being made to his destination. “.
Walker contacted the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (Acas) in March 2021 to investigate the issues, but was fired the same month. The court said that “two other employees, who acted similarly to the plaintiff, were still recruited in a while afterwards. “
The company ordered him to pay him £2,945. 86 (£1,730. 76 gross for notice, £102. 60 for expenses and £1,112. 50 for pension contributions) for breach of contract, £9,367. 35 for unfair dismissal, £6,339. 85 for unauthorised deductions from salary, £2,250 for holidays. salary and £1,076 for failing to provide in writing the main points of employment. The total owed is £21,979. 06.
Despite the court decision, Walker says he didn’t get his cash from the company despite repeated efforts to do so. “I ended up with a debt collection company: the people on [TV show] can’t pay?We take,” he said. They had to go straight to [Mr. Thomas’s] house several times. “He claims that they tried to set up payment plans with Mr Thomas in 2022 and that Mr Walker got a payment of £500 but has not won anything since. .
Footage seen via WalesOnline shows Cobra Financial Solutions, a Liverpool-based debt collection agency, knocking on Mr Thomas’ door on April 15 this year. It shows M. Thomas opening the door of his house dressed in lycra cycling pants and an educational T-shirt and the debt collector asking him to check who he is before being told that he is connected with the Broadband Infrastructure Company, which owes Mr. Walker approximately £22,000.
“Yes, but obviously, right now the company doesn’t have any money,” he replies. “We need to set the record straight. [The company] ceased operations two years ago. There’s no money. . . There is no money.
Mr. Thomas can be heard saying that he is “broke” and that he has “been through a pandemic. “The collector is heard saying that his client could simply take the legal direction for the money, to which Mr. Thomas replies, “It’s totally up to them, I can’t stop it. If they need to, it’s up to them.
He then heard Mr Thomas say that he was “waiting for a contract to come in” and that there had been “backlogs and delays”, adding: “It may still happen, but I don’t need to say that it will come and that it is not. . . Until that happens, I can’t do anything.
When asked what the contract is, he replies that it is “a project, a project. . . some paintings abroad. ” Until that happens, if it happens, I’m sure it will happen, nothing. “
Mr. Thomas is heard saying he is out of cash and no longer has a car, adding, “If you see us again in a month, we’ll know what’s going on. We’ve been waiting for this since last August. The debt collector provides Mr. Thomas with a card with the main points of his card and asks them to get in touch and tells them they will report what he told Mr. Walker.
“It’s not dead yet, we’ve been waiting for it for a long time and that’s because it’s a complex deal,” he said. When told that he doesn’t deny owing money, he replied, “The company owes money, yes. Personally I don’t know, but the company owes money.
Walker told WalesOnline he had a few more features left to review and get his money back. He said of Mr Thomas: “He’s like a Robert Maxwell of Poundland. He treats him like rubbish. “
Peter McCormick, 63, was founded in Snowdonia when he was presented in November 2020 with the role of Country Sales Manager at i4 Technology Group Ltd, which is still listed as active at Companies House and of which Thomas remains co-director. He says he was told the company would provide broadband to municipalities, new structure and subdivisions of sizes. In February 2021, he claims to have earned two weeks’ salary despite having worked the full month, which he had been told would be rectified. .
“The second month, [I paid] through another company. I still hadn’t won my car allowance, which amounts to £500 a month. Every time I paid, pieces were missing, weeks,” he says.
“We were told there would be a big infrastructure investment of £2-3 million in January, but that never happened. They told me to start looking for other people to supply and everything. My son-in-law John Golding took an interest and joined us.
“We arrived in May [2021] and then we were told that the investment wouldn’t come until August, but that we needed to start recruiting clients. I had communicated with councils across the UK who were negotiating contracts worth around £4-5 million with me. “
McCormick says his salary was largely corrected in May 2021, when he says he then received a call from someone else at the company telling him he had been garnished for nonpayment of a debt and was being fired. “John and I spent day and night uploading a bunch of knowledge to the CRM and then grass clippings. John had just had another baby and suddenly found himself unemployed. »
A few weeks later, McCormick said he won a call from a recruiting center naming him national sales manager. “About halfway through, I asked him if it was for the company he used to work for and itArray,” he says. “I told him that the land had been confiscated from me and now they were advertising my work. Websites are very futuristic, but this is just a pipe dream. “
In March 2022, i4 Technology was ordered to pay Peter McCormick £5,810. 83 in damages for breach of contract after he was inadvertently sacked and £6,547. 51 for unlawful deductions from his salary, totalling £12,358. 34. Since he didn’t earn the cash two years later, he used several collection agencies to pay and collect the debt.
Dave Bradford, 61, is a network engineer at Holyhead and previously worked at i4 Technology Group Limited from April 2021 to March 2022. In July 2022, he earned £6,599. 52 in illegally deducted salary from the company, which he claims he still has. not earned. receipt.
Mr Thomas, on behalf of i4 Technology, then applied for reconsideration of the court’s decision, saying that he was not aware of the proceedings until he obtained an enforcement order from the County Court of Glocuester and Cheltenham. Mr. Thomas said this due to the fact that the court was out of shape. It was sent to Mr Sparc Menai Science Park in Anglesey, but the company’s management was replaced at Telford Lodge in Conwy. The court rejected this ruling, saying that the claim form had been sent to the correct address at the time. .
Bradford said he was pleased to find a project in his sector that he hoped would improve the lives of others in his North Wales domain. “It was great to find something that was local and contributed to the local community. There’s not a lot of work in Anglesey or North Wales,” he said.
But he describes his time at the company, from which he claims to have been fired in 2022, as a “total disaster” and paints a picture of a “global culture of incompetent relationships with customers, workers and suppliers”. It’s a real mess. If we needed supplies, such as fiber optics, they wouldn’t supply them and say they hadn’t paid for the last order. “
Messrs. Walker, McCormick and Bradford, along with an organisation of other former employees, have now joined together with the aim of forcing i4 Technology Group Ltd and Broadband Infrastructure Company Ltd to declare insolvency, which would secure them a small amount. of government cash, even if for many of them it won’t be as much as they’re owed. “The characteristics are that we compulsively force the company to declare insolvency, which is what we seek to raise the cash for. “”The other option is for it to voluntarily file for insolvency,” explained Walker, who is based in Stockport and still works in the broadband sector.
“Personally, I need it to stop. I don’t need him to do that to other people. I sent him a colossal amount of emails and texts. He made me an offering of £18,000 in December, but he owes me more. “than that. I don’t accept it as true with him.
“I had cancer in 2016. Everything he did put a lot of stress on me. I’ll be 60 in September and I have a smart life. We have a big house, vacations, cars. The motivation for me is to save and prevent me from doing this to someone else.
“I’m a Mancunian with a bloody mind. I will continue to insist until Elfed Thomas is arrested and I can no longer employ people. Otherwise, you will be informed of the lesson. We’re a big nuisance to him. He presents himself as the Alan Sugar of Wales. “
Mr. McCormick claimed that the effects of the hard work court will have to be sealed through a county court and that the only stated deal he had was that of Mr. Thomas, so he, as co-director, was sued for the cash. Although the mandatory insolvency proceedings will charge them a lot of pounds each, former workers say they feel their most productive hope is to get the cash back.
“If you get the company insolvent, you can get a sum of £4,000 to £5,000 guaranteed through the government,” McCormick said, adding that the ordeal of chasing cash affected his intellectual aptitude after returning to the UK. I had a serious twist of fate in Cyprus. ” I had to see a doctor and I’m on medication for depression. I’m much older than I was two years ago, but I’m suicidal. My family’s life has been horrible. The reason we went through this ordeal is because my wife survived Hillsborough and lost a family member with her.
“She identified the symptoms [of intellectual fitness issues] and helped me overcome them. The monetary aspect is the maximum, not the vital element. The only thing in terms of retaliation is to see those corporations shut down. Mr McCormick said he had been “in the depths of despair” over the matter and had to waste “intellectual and physical” energy to recover, adding that they had to help his stepson monetarily who had been sacked from i4. You’ll have to collect around £25,000, the maximum of which we’ll never see again. It was a complicated adventure and we survived, but it wasn’t easy. “
Mr Bradford claims that he won a payment of £400 but did not get more and that he also used a collection company to pay it. He said: “It’s completely frustrating. It’s just as important to save him from doing anything else. “. We need to put an end to it.
“You are the one who is forced to turn to debt collectors. He has no resources, he has a good situation in Conwy. The law can’t do anything about it. I’ve more or less accepted that I never will. Get my cash back.
Other court decisions have been issued ordering Mr. Thomas to pay cash to former employees. In March 2022, i4 Technology Group Limited was ordered to pay £8,971. 44 (£8,410. 44 in unauthorised payroll deductions and £516 in licence fees) to Callum Saunderson. The same company will also have to pay £5,692. 96 to M. I. In October 2023, an employment tribunal awarded Harvinder Chatha £65,635. 29 for unauthorised wage deductions through i4 Technology between October 2021 and January 2023.
In 2022, John Golding also earned £3,820. 47 in total: £2,916. 66 in unauthorised payroll deductions, £673. 05 in damages for failing to pay a month’s redundancy, and £230. 76 in holiday pay owed.
We reached out to Mr. Thomas regarding Mr. Thomas’ claims. Walker, Mr. McCormick and Mr. Bradford in relation to their employment, court decisions opposing i4 Technology and Broadband Infrastructure Company, their claims relating to non-payment of court awards. and their private perspectives on it. He issued the following in response: “In light of recent events, it is important to explain that all parties involved have agreed to terms of confidentiality, adding to Mr. Walker through a verbal agreement. Disclosing any information outside of the parameters of the prize is a violation of those terms.
“Like many others in the unprecedented era of the Covid-19 pandemic, our company has faced significant cash flow issues. To address those issues and move our operations forward, our shareholders and managers have collectively invested more than £1. 2 million. Despite those efforts, unfortunately, external cases have led us to the resolution to proceed with a Voluntary Liquidation of Creditors (CVL).
“It is pertinent to note that the claims filed through some Americans before the court do not reflect as should be the veracity of the duration or situations of employment. Among applicants, the longest tenure was just over 12 months, while others were hired for just two months. These assignments of tasks were conditional on the release of projects that, unfortunately, did not materialize.
“The allegations, inaccuracies in public statements, and direct threats directed at our businesses and Americans are unexpected and disheartening. We intend to maintain our commitment to moral practices and legal criteria in this closing process. No additional statements will be issued at this time. ” Lord. Walker, McCormick and Bradford deny agreeing to any kind of nondisclosure agreement with Bradford. Thomas forbade them from talking about topics similar to their employment at i4 Technology or Broadband Infrastructure.