Woman loses £4m fight against boss after escort claims

A CITY executive has lost her £4m sex discrimination case against her former boss after a tribunal ruled she had not been a "persuasive" witness.

Jordan Wimmer had her claims for sex discrimination, disability discrimination, unfair constructive dismissal and an unauthorised deduction from her wages dismissed by the central London employment tribunal.

The 29-year-old had accused her boss Mark Lowe of bringing escorts to business meetings and discussing his sexual fantasies with her.

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Mr Lowe had denied a string of allegations including claims that he paid for escort girls, made sexist jokes and hired a hitman to try to run Ms Wimmer down.

A written judgment by the tribunal concluded: "We did not find the claimant a persuasive witness.

"Her dramatic account is simply not corroborated by the overwhelming totality of the contemporaneous documents... and the attempts made by the claimant during the course of the hearing to corroborate her claims of sexual harassment... put bluntly, backfired."

The reserved judgement comes after Ms Wimmer, a Canadian who lives in Chelsea, attempted to bring the case against hedge fund firm Nomos Capital.

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The tribunal heard that her evidence was "exaggerated" in relation to the quantity of jokes that Mr Lowe sent her and that allegations of his having brought escorts to business meetings were "wholly unsupported".

The tribunal said Mr Lowe had circulated email jokes – in "poor taste" for the "most part" – but it was shown that only 15 of these jokes were found amidst the 185,000 emails in Ms Wimmer's computer system dating from 2006.

Mr Lowe had also admitted Ms Wimmer had "quite possibly" been present when he had viewed the website of an international escort agency but denied using their services.

Ms Wimmer joined Mr Lowe's firm in 2004 on a salary of 50,000 a year but, over four years, her pay rose to 577,000.

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After experiencing depression she was treated in a 10,000-a-week private clinic in 2008 paid for from a loan from the firm.

She returned to work but stormed out after her wages were deducted to repay the 60,000 loan, the tribunal was told.

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