A car salesman accused of theft for buying a customer’s trade-in for a higher price in an “around the corner” deal has won €10,000 for unfair dismissal.
The employee, Alex Collins, was fired in November 2024 by Cork City motor dealership Kevin O’Leary Silversprings Ltd, trading as the Kevin O’Leary Group.
His complaint under the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977 was upheld by the Workplace Relations Commission in a decision published on Thursday.
Collins considered himself “a high-performing employee”, as he had passed probation after joining in August 2023 and earned around €60,000 in 2024 before his dismissal – roughly doubling his basic annual salary of €30,000 with what he made on commission.
Collins came under scrutiny after a customer complained that he had been asked to park a car he intended to trade in “around the corner”, company sales manager Dermot O’Sullivan said in evidence.
The customer had called it “an unusual way of doing business”, O’Sullivan said. He said it “raised concerns about deviations from standard procedures”.
Company director Kevin O’Leary said he started looking at sales records after the customer complaint and discovered that Collins seemed to have “deleted or edited” an entry in a spreadsheet recording trade-ins.
Other records “suggested the transaction may have been arranged for a family member of the complainant” and that Collins had tried to put the car outside the company systems, he said.
O’Leary said he also found Collins “incorrectly recorded ownership details” for another vehicle, a Renault Kadjar.
He said the dismissal was for “gross misconduct involving alleged fraudulent trading of a trade-in” and that Collins had “admitted the allegation”.
Finance director Kevin Cronin said Collins admitted that the Renault “had ultimately gone to his mother”.
“The incident involved a breach of trust so fundamental that past performance could not outweigh it,” Cronin said.
Collins said he was called to a meeting with company director Kevin O’Leary where he was “accused of buying a car directly from a customer at a higher price”.
Having been presented with allegations “late in the day”, he said he was “given 15 minutes to decide whether to resign or be dismissed” and was put under “severe stress”.
Collins denied “any fraudulent intent” and said that buying trade-in cars was “understood by staff to be a perk of the job”.
He claimed the true reason was because the dealership’s management had taken the view he was not “flexible” enough following a dispute about taking leave on a Saturday.
Adjudicator Úna Glazier-Farmer wrote in her decision that the dealership “may have had reasonable grounds to form the belief [Collins] misconducted himself”.
However, she found the employer had failed to adhere to either its own disciplinary rules or the statutory code of practice for workplace disciplinaries.
There was an “absence of impartiality” in the process as O’Leary carried out the investigation and decided on the sanction, she wrote. She also identified the short notice of the disciplinary meeting and a lack of documentation of the process decision to dismiss as issues.
Ruling the dismissal unfair, she decided it was “just and equitable” to award Collins €10,000.
This was in view of his “failure to adequately mitigate his losses” by looking for new work and his contribution to the dismissal, she wrote.