A former employee of a Kenyan Bank will be smiling all the way to another bank after her former employer was ordered to pay her Ksh38 million.
Minnie Mbue, who was an executive at the Bank, was awarded the money by the Court of Appeal after suing for unfair dismissal.
The bank had made an application seeking to have a directive to make the payment frozen until it files a suit challenging the award at the Supreme Court.
The Appellate, however, dismissed the suit noting that the case did not meet the threshold of a Supreme Court hearing.
“We say so because firstly, the issue in dispute was the terminal benefits payable to Ms Mbue following her termination. The answer to the dispute lay with the terms of her contract of employment,” ruled the three-judge bench.
Mbue had joined the Bank in 2010 but the board terminated her employment in 2011 as part of structural changes.
She filed a suit soon after arguing that her sacking was unfair. In 2013, the Employment and Labour Relations Court awarded her Ksh15 million as compensation.
The Bank appealed the case at the Court of Appeal and the compensation was bumped up to Ksh38 million.
Before joining the bank, Mbue had served as a manager in the Bank Supervision Division at the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK).
The award comes as many companies are contemplating restructuring their workforce following the adverse effects of Covid-19.
As of December 2020, over 5 million Kenyans had lost their income with the outlook growing dimmer in 2021, a year that had been touted as the rebound period for businesses and industries.
Many small-medium enterprises have decried the re-institution of a lockdown in five counties with strict measures curfew hours to curb the spread of Covid-19.
