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A world-renowned fragrance house based in Bishop’s Stortford smelled a rat when an employee forwarded confidential business information to her personal email address.
After Madly Massengo was sacked by CPL Aromas Ltd for gross misconduct, she took the London Road perfumer to an employment tribunal.
The Frenchwoman, who was 39 at the time of her sacking, alleged unfair dismissal and that she had been directly discriminated against because of her age, but a judge found her claims were baseless.
She joined the company as a trainee perfumer on April 3, 2017, and signed an agreement to abide by CPL’s handbook for staff which said: “Under no circumstances should copies of… data be removed or transmitted from the company premises… CPL Aromas regards computer system security to be of paramount importance. Any individual action or inaction, which compromises this security, will be considered to be a disciplinary matter.”
The tribunal was told the confidentiality of formulas and pricing details were critical to CPL: “The respondent is a world-leading fragrance house with headquarters in the UK. It is independent and family-owned and creates fragrances for use in fine fragrance, personal care and household products.
“The respondent is part of a very competitive market. With any fragrance house, its only real intellectual property is its formulas for its fragrances and the costings of those formulas and fragrances. These are the main commercially valuable points of difference between the respondent and its competitors.
“As a result, information relating to formulas and costings is tightly safeguarded… employees are not automatically granted access to this system but instead access is given on a need-to-know basis.
“As a trainee perfumer, the claimant would have had to change her access to the system each time she moved departments and would only have been granted access to those specific projects that she was working on at that time.”
Nevertheless, Ms Massengo breached the IT rules. There were also problems with her attitude and aptitude.
CPL’s director of perfumery Alexandra Kosinski told the tribunal Ms Massengo had not reached the level required to qualify as a junior perfumer. Moreover, when given negative feedback about her performance, she refused to accept any criticism and expressed the view that she already had all the skills that she needed.
At the end of the hearing, employment Judge Catrin Lewis found in favour of CPL Aromas.
She said: “We were unable to find any credible evidence to suggest, or from which we could infer, that someone who was younger than 30 would have been treated any differently in the same circumstances.
“The reason Ms Massengo was not offered the role of junior perfumer was that she had not performed well enough over the course of the training programme.
“We have not found any credible evidence from which we could infer that their assessments were influenced in any way by her age.
“We are satisfied it was within the range of reasonable responses for CPL Aromas to draw adverse conclusions from Ms Massengo’s conduct in deleting her sent emails as being evidence that she knew what she was doing was wrong and was attempting to cover her tracks.
“Not only had Ms Massengo breached the policy, we have found she had attempted to cover her tracks. As a result, CPL Aromas could no longer be expected to have trust and confidence in her.”
The Indie invited CPL to comment but the business declined. Founded in 1971 by brothers Michael and Terry Pickthall, it remains family-owned, employs more than 600 people and has 18 international locations, serving customers in over 100 countries.
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