Sangster hits back over e-mail ‘porn'

Award-winning chef Bruce Sangster, who is claiming unfair dismissal after being sacked by Lehman Brothers investment bank for sending allegedly pornographic e-mails, told a tribunal this week that passing on and viewing sexually explicit images on the computer was "common in the chefs' world".

Sangster, 49, of Haslingfield, Cambridge, was dismissed in January after nine years as executive chef at Lehman's European headquarters in London.

At the employment tribunal in London, Sangster said in a written statement: "My competition work has brought me into contact with many top chefs and they usually share a taste for crude humour and often e-mailed jokes.

"Although they were often crude and sexual in nature, I would not describe them as pornographic because they were clearly designed to amuse rather than to arouse."

The tribunal had previously heard that Lehman Brothers had hired strippers to entertain kitchen staff at its London headquarters on Sangster's first day there as a chef.

Sangster admits forwarding an e-mail entitled Mission Impossible to three chefs who worked outside of Lehman Brothers from a computer that was also used by several other members of the dining team.

Sangster, who had an unblemished employment record with the company, claimed he was given the company's technology policy for the first time at a disciplinary hearing on 2 January.

Sean Jones, representing Lehman Brothers, told the tribunal that even if the chef had not seen the company's technology policy he should have used his common sense. "Any reasonable person would have concluded that this would be unacceptable in a working environment. He had read the company handbook about misuse of company software and he must have understood that forwarding obscene material to others was a misuse of the company's computer network system," he said.

The tribunal panel reserved judgement and a decision is expected to be announced in December.