The Court of Appeal has dismissed the appeal in the long-running and complex case Simpson v Cantor Fitzgerald. It covered a lot of ground. Most of the grounds of appeal were rejected on the basis they were attempts to dress up challenges to facts as issues of law (or, as the Court of Appeal put it at paragraph 64, "make bricks without straw"). But there were a couple of points of legal interest:-
1. although it is an error for an employment tribunal not to set out relevant legal principles in its reasons, particularly in a complex case, the real question is whether the tribunal got the underlying law wrong. In this case, they had not, so the failure to cite the relevant statutory extracts was not enough to allow the appeal to succeed (paragraphs 29-32).
2. the Court of Appeal bangs a further nail into the coffin of Cavendish Munro v Geduld, confirming there is no hard boundary between disclosing information and making allegations (paragraphs 53-54).
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