A senior manager at a Jersey training company has had her claim for unfair dismissal rejected after sharing confidential materials with a potential competitor and secretly recording her own disciplinary meeting, an employment tribunal has ruled.
Michelle Bruce, former Head of Customer Services at Chapter One, was sacked without notice in April 2025.
She claimed she had been unfairly dismissed and was owed notice pay, but the Employment and Discrimination Tribunal has rejected her claim.
Issues began when Chapter One explored expanding its business into the Isle of Man.
A woman referred to in the judgment as “Miss M” was involved in those discussions. When negotiations collapsed, Miss Bruce was told to stop assisting her.
But forensic computer experts later found evidence suggesting Miss Bruce accessed restricted company systems while on an encrypted call with Miss M and sent internal material across.
The company alleged that the data flow wasn’t limited to a simple screenshot, as Miss Bruce initially claimed.
According to expert analysis, it included policies, procedures and internal documents, and parts of Miss M’s website reportedly contained wording identical to Chapter One’s own materials.
The tribunal found the company had reasonable grounds to believe Miss Bruce had breached her duty of confidentiality and helped a business that was effectively becoming a competitor.
Miss Bruce argued she had done nothing wrong. She said she only sent publicly available screenshots and described one instance of assistance as a “two-second job”.
She also claimed she had been instructed by her line manager to provide support, which the manager denied. The tribunal found no convincing evidence that such permission had been given.
When confronted during an internal investigation with forensic evidence from her laptop, Miss Bruce admitted she had provided support to Miss M, despite earlier saying she had not.
The tribunal concluded the company genuinely believed she had acted dishonestly during that investigation.
It later emerged that Miss Bruce had secretly recorded part of the disciplinary process – despite being expressly told recording was prohibited and reminded of that rule before the meeting began.
In the tribunal, she accepted she had made the covert recording, claiming that she did not trust the company to produce accurate minutes.
“I would have found Miss Bruce’s action of covert recording, alone, in the circumstances of this case to have amounted to gross misconduct,” the tribunal said.
The tribunal accepted evidence that Miss Bruce continued to have links with the Isle of Man business after leaving Chapter One. That business later collaborated locally with her new employer.
The company described the damage to its business. The tribunal noted that an employer is entitled to view an employee helping a commercial rival as a betrayal of trust.
Tribunal deputy chair Advocate Cyril Whelan observed that “no one can serve two masters because their demands are likely to conflict, forcing divided loyalty”.
“The company was entitled to regard Miss Bruce as having betrayed the allegiance which she owed it, by helping a commercial competitor; it was entitled to regard that betrayal as amounting to gross misconduct in the way described by the authorities just cited,” he added.
After a two-day hearing and reviewing around 1,300 pages of documents, the tribunal ruled that Chapter One had reasonable grounds to believe Miss Bruce shared confidential information.
Advocate Whelan found it was reasonable to treat her conduct as gross misconduct, and concluded that the dismissal was within the range of responses open to a reasonable employer.
Miss Bruce was not entitled to notice pay because her own actions amounted to a serious breach of contract, and her claims for unfair dismissal and wrongful dismissal both failed.