Nomura faces shock claims at tribunal
NOMURA is accused of making a star salesman redundant because he blew the whistle on client abuses at the Lehman Brothers Europe division it bought last year, an employment tribunal heard yesterday.
In accusations denied by Nomura, former sales star Paul Ryb said his redundancy from the Japanese bank in March 2009 was motivated by his decision to speak out about abuses at the division Nomura bought in October 2008.
He says after he made the assertions in 2005 his career took a downward turn. The claims, made for Ryb by Andrew Hochhauser, QC, focus on Paul Norris, who is now head of European research at Nomura. He was head of European technology, media and telecoms at the Lehman arm.
Norris, Ryb alleges, misled Lehman clients to maximise short-term gains for his division, during the October 2005 initial public offering of Belgium’s biggest broadband provider Telenet.
Ryb said Norris buried research that may have put clients off buying the offering, which he knew to be overpriced. This, he said, resulted in “huge” losses for the clients, including GLG and BlackRock.
Ryb, who suffers from a degenerative eye disease, also said the redundancy was planned to come ahead of a legal threshold forcing Nomura to cover his health insurance in future.
Nomura denies the claims and said if it wanted to offload Ryb due to any 2005 claims it would have done so in previous redundancy rounds.
The proceedings, in Stratford, East London, were part of an “interim relief” claim by Ryb to have his job reinstated .
This comes ahead of a full tribunal at a future date.