Former Sellafield consultant claims the nuclear complex tampered with evidence

Suspicious of the letters

The three letters have been a central point of contention in McDermott’s court battle.

The Information Commissioner’s Office ruled in early 2021 that Sellafield had acted unlawfully, having broken data laws and committed security breaches for, among other things, failing to supply McDermott with the letters after she had made a data subject access request.

Sellafield subsequently used the critical letters against McDermott in the employment tribunal case she brought over the termination of her contract.

McDermott told Thursday’s tribunal that the letters had caused her “significant detriment”.

She said Sellafield “recognised I was a nationally respected expert in my field of work” and had rehired her “in glowing terms” after her first 12 months working at the nuclear facility. After she submitted a report that was critical of Sellafield’s HR function, she says her contract was quickly terminated and Sellafield began to build a case against her, using the letters.

She said she suspected HR managers had “colluded” in the production of the letters to build an after-the-fact case against her in view of the developing litigation.

“Senior HR managers had written letters at home on personal computers, printed them off, put them in their briefcase and took them into work,” she said. “So, of course I was suspicious about the letters.”

She told the tribunal she was first made aware of the letters, which appeared to support Sellafield’s court claims that it had “serious concerns about her performance”, when they were disclosed for her first tribunal case in 2021.

McDermott said she had become suspicious of Sellafield’s official reason for terminating her contract – that she was being let go due to “financial reasons” – when she became aware that HR contracts were being issued at around the same time “to the value of £17 million”. She said these new contracts also covered her area of expertise: equality, diversity and inclusion.

She argued the letters seriously impacted her ability to find further gainful employment after she stopped working at Sellafield.

Legal representatives for Sellafield told a previous tribunal hearing that the “financial reasons” explanation had been provided so as to “be kind” to McDermott.

‘Wiped’ metadata

McDermott says the metadata for two of the three letters was “wiped” by DLA Piper, the firm of solicitors then representing Sellafield, and that the letters were not mentioned in the facility’s initial tribunal disclosures.

“I found it astonishing that [neither] the authors nor the dates were mentioned,” she said of two of the three letters.

The only letter in which the metadata had been retained and disclosed to the court, McDermott said, suggested that HR managers had collaborated improperly in the production of critical letters which she believes damaged her reputation.

“The metadata” showed that “the document had been open for three hours” during its production, she said.

McDermott argued this was relevant because Heather Roberts, an HR manager at Sellafield, had asked the authors of the letters “to produce and send them on personal emails”.

She said that phone records she had requested for Roberts “showed there was a [concurrent] conversation” taking place during the three-hour window when the document was open, which McDermott said raised suspicions of “collusion” in the production of the letters.

McDermott told the court that Sellafield had sought to cast further aspersions on her character when she questioned the apparent discrepancies in the letters.

“The narrative that’s being portrayed about me is that I’m vexatious and unreasonable,” she said. “But my suspicions came about as a result of a chronology of unusual and mysterious events.”

Panesar told the tribunal that McDermott’s allegations of “tampering with the metadata” of the three letters was “a baseless claim”. He said that allegedly removed or tampered metadata had been “restored” and provided to the previous tribunal.

He accused McDermott of “unreasonable conduct”. He said Sellafield and the NDA had answered McDermott’s employment tribunal claims on their own merits, including on their merits as whistleblowing claims, and that both organisations had “been vindicated” a number of times.

No independent digital forensics expert was hired by the various parties or by the tribunal to assess the respective claims concerning the letters.

Robertson will make a decision on costs at a later date.