'Party time' banker who went on Diwali bender and missed work loses race claim

dailystar.co.uk:

work after going on a weekend bender to celebrate Diwali has lost a case for race discrimination.£60,000-a-year finance worker Priyank Thakkar took a Friday off to mark the Indian religious festival, an employment tribunal heard.But he texted his boss at 2.30pm on the following Monday to say he was not coming in as he was too hungover after a family party.“I overdrank, vomited and passed out and only woke up an hour ago, sorry,” he explained.The broker at City firm Gallardo Securities also missed work after failing to catch several flights back from trips abroad and when he did turn up would occasionally wear trainers and baseball cap to the office.And he even made up needing to have an operation, allowing him to be absent for another 11 days, the tribunal was told.Furious managers warned him ‘It’s not party time’ and that he the way he had been acting was ‘terrible’ and ‘catastrophic’, the panel heard.After missing 55 days’ work in just a year, Mr Thakkar was suspended following a missed flight back from Amsterdam and then resigned a day later.He has now unsuccessfully sued the firm for race discrimination and unfair dismissal after the tribunal found he had lied to his bosses and ‘appeared to think it was entirely acceptable to have done so’.Mr Thakkar, who is Indian, started working at Gallardo, an inter-dealer broker based in London, in 2017.The hearing, held in central London, was told he irregularly attended work and in 2018, his bosses began to have concerns about his unreliability and frequent unauthorised absences.When he was asked about this change of behaviour in 2019, Mr Thakkar explained he was suffering from PTSD due an earthquake in his childhood triggered by the raised voices on the open trading floor,.