Royal Court condemns ‘bad faith’ campaign to remove successful CEO as ‘improper, commercially unacceptable and unconscionable’

The judgment handed down by Jersey’s Royal Court finally marks the end of the most difficult chapter in my life. 

After six years of dignified yet painful silence, I can now finally tell this story: the roles of each person involved, including those still at the Society, the deliberate attempts to destroy or conceal crucial WhatsApp and personal email evidence, the delays, the insults, and the loneliness and financial stresses of standing up to a huge organisation backed by one of the largest insurers in the world, and their battalion of expensive lawyers.

For now, I confine myself this to the overview. This tale is of a decent, talented, loyal and successful corporate leader – a local boy who’s entire 30‑year career was spent with the Channel Islands Co‑operative Society, as I rose from trainee store manager aged 20 to CEO. Yet my reward for making the Society profitable and consistently maintaining not just a 4% dividend but also a double dividend for members, was to have my career, my health and my reputation needlessly destroyed in a brutally toxic and concerted campaign of vicious boardroom bullying and victimisation. I was ruthlessly targeted again and again. In the words of my then President, Ben Shenton, I was “boiled alive.” 

However, this is also a corporate governance scandal about how an unconscionable cabal of scheming, ambitious and self‑serving directors were able to seize control of the well‑managed, highly profitable Channel Islands Co‑operative Society. Once described by Allan Leighton, then Chair of the Co‑operative Group, as “a role model for Co‑ops everywhere”, they brought the Society to its knees in a spiral of chaotic dysfunction and divisive board infighting. 

For absolutely no reason, other than perhaps that “my face didn’t fit”, I was punished time and time again. First, by being targeted to the point where my health completely collapsed; and second, by being unfairly dismissed after I had been forced to take sick leave because of work‑related stress. I will describe how the board sub‑committee of Jennifer Carnegie (whom the Court described as the “ringleader”), Paula Williams and Carol Champion continued to victimise me and push impatiently for my exit while I was off sick. Their actions – cutting off my email access, denying me adequate medical and HR support, breaching my data protection rights and utterly failing to undertake any due process while seeking my urgent removal and replacement by Ms Williams, their own conflicted and ill‑qualified candidate – are so shocking that readers may find them difficult to believe. 

But it didn’t stop there, as an act of desperation, these three principal witnesses sought to engage in character assassination through their witness testimony, shamelessly attempting to land unheralded scurrilous accusations such as ‘misogyny’, lacking honesty and ‘ruling by fear’. 

The Royal Court ruled that the behaviour and actions of Ms Carnegie, Ms Williams and Ms Champion were “improper, commercially unacceptable and unconscionable”. And therefore amounted to bad faith. 

The Court also ruled that my President and line manager Ben Shenton acted in breach of duty in performing a “volte-face” after encouraging me to write a letter of complaint to elicit Ms Carnegie’s resignation only to refuse to accept it when she duly offered to resign. The court also described his failure to require Ms Williams’ resignation as a further breach of duty. To be fair to Mr Shenton, he briefly admitted a ‘Road to Damascus’ epiphany and temporarily tried to help, confessing to having ‘played both sides’ before withdrawing from the case.

The actions of Chris Lintell, the then Chief Governance Officer and Society Secretary, who was the conscience of the Society, were described as ‘astonishing’ by the Court. He was found to have encouraged the use of private communication channels and failed to take any steps to preserve relevant correspondence for disclosure. Furthermore, he subsequently presided over significant evidence destruction. He even encouraged the directors to use the term ‘the subject’ when referring to me.

The narrative of injustice, although evidentially and emotionally compelling, is not just about the damage done to me – the Society’s own loyal leader and longstanding CEO. It is the worrying story of how the very ethos of our Co‑operative Society – your Co‑operative Society – which had openness, honesty, collaboration, kindness and “co‑operation” as its bedrock, was gradually corroded by boardroom scheming, bullying, conflicts of interest, smear campaigns and divisive and dangerous corporate behaviour of the very worst kind. My story is one of the most graphic accounts of corporate governance failure and unfair dismissal ever seen, and not just in Jersey. 

After the fight of my life, I am going to take some much-needed time out now to recharge, but after a few weeks out, I intend to tell my story here. All of it. No doubt I will be subjected to yet more nastiness as I do so. But, I believe our community and the Society’s members need to understand what happened. We all need to learn from it, and to take action to ensure that this cannot happen again.

Before I do though, I want to be clear, mine is not a stand against co-operative values or principles, for which I retain huge fondness, only against those who abandoned them in favour of their own ambition and personal agendas.

Finally, when this website was eventually returned to me by the Society, after numerous requests, all my subscribers had inexplicably been removed. 

Please kindly subscribe if you wish to see future instalments. 

I have not yet even scratched the surface.

Colin

Footnote

My seven year crawl to justice evidences my unwavering belief that it’s crucial we stand up against wrongdoing, even though it has relentlessly felt lonely and gruelling. I regret the hardship and isolation it brought not just to me but my children, but I know it is vital for fostering accountability and integrity. People that have our trust need to deserve it. By telling my story I am not motivated by rubbing salt into any wounds, more to offer hope and encouragement to the whistleblowers and victims out there. The fight is lonely and bloody hard. But the truth does eventually out. At least it has for me.

Of all the things I have achieved in my life, climbing this mountain was the hardest. But also the proudest.