CARMEL RICKARD: Hazardous head-hunt
A former employee is sued for damages — and has to pay up — after he breached the terms of his contract
The judicial year has barely started and already the courts have delivered several decisions on restraint of trade. But one stands out from every other restraint decision I have seen. It’s a stark warning for the national workplace: a financial expert has been ordered to pay almost R300,000 in damages to his former firm after he head-hunted a colleague to join him at his new place of employment. And he must pay interest and the legal costs. The case concerns retail conglomerate Massmart, whose divisions include Makro and Game. One of their most difficult calls is working out where to locate branches of the divisions, fitting stores to the right local demographics and making sure divisions do not compete with each other.Jacques Theron, at the centre of this legal row, and who now personally owes his former employers those court-awarded damages, was head of the company’s "business intelligence" unit, responsible for making decisions in this complex but crucial field. At the end of Feb...
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