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Former Irish employee not mean to have internal documents, he says, and asks how he got them
A senior manager at a global Indian IT firm has denied his company “lied” to a client about the position a former Irish employee would hold on a project team, the WRC has heard..
Photograph: Alan Betson/The Irish TimesA senior manager at a global Indian IT firm has denied his company “lied” to a client about the position a former Irish employee would hold on a project team. He said the worker wasn’t meant to have internal documents suggesting his responsibilities went beyond the firm’s work in Ireland – and asked how he got them.
The former employee, IT project manager Derek Canning, is pursuing a claim under the unfair Dismissals Act 1977, challenging his alleged redundancy from HCL Ireland Information Systems Ltd in 2024.heard on Thursday that the Indian-headquartered global IT giant let go all seven of its staff and contractors, including Mr Canning, in 2024. AI companies are starting to sound desperate, and that’s not a good lookMeta’s huge settlement and how useful is an open plan office?
It was after it was forced to agree a €1 million “discount” on a major IT project for packaging firm WestRock following months of delays to the project, the tribunal heard. The WRC has heard that in 2022, HCL was engaged to set up a manufacturing software and central database system called enterprise resource planning at 35 of its sites in Europe, including Limerick and Belfast.
HCL set about establishing and training two teams of 33 people each to staff the project – one for Continental Europe, the other for Ireland and the UK, the tribunal heard. Mr Canning’s case is that he was hired as a commercial project manager, working remotely to deliver modules of the ERP system dealing with finance, shipping and customer service at sites in both Ireland and the UK.
The firm maintains Mr Canning a manager for Ireland, but when the project came under cost pressure, his responsibilities were given to a senior technical manager, an Indian national based in the UK. Cross-examining Ram Samant, an associate vice-president at the firm, Mr Canning produced what he said were screenshots of organisational charts from 2023 which showed him as “the commercial project manager” on the “green team” covering Ireland and the UK, and the senior technical manager “operations”.
“I worked on the project. Are you worried about them? ” Mr Canning replied. There was no answer from the witness.
Mr Samant said the documents Mr Canning exhibited were “what we showed to our customer to build confidence that we had a team in place” but that the final structure of the project team was different.
“No, we don’t lie to customers; we position to customers,” Mr Samant said. In his evidence in chief, Mr Samant the first site went live with the new technology package in April 2024, and at that point, WestRock – then set to merge with Smurfit Kappa – decided to “conserve money” with a smaller team and a slower timeline. Car drives off M50 bridge, causing closure and major traffic disruptionLATEST STORIES
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