Opinion and reporting by Mathew Carr

March 15, 2023 — LONDON –I lost my climate-whistleblowing-unfair-dismissal litigation it seems, yet I contend there were multiple miscarriages of justice — including bad behavior during the almost-three-year legal process from the judiciary, legal reps and Bloomberg executives.

I might have done better too. As one person I later realised wasn’t a friend told me near the beginning of the process: “Coulda woulda shoulda!”

I was fired by Bloomberg LP in May 2020 and then initiated a claim for automatic unfair dismissal because it’s against British law to fire a whistleblower.

That law, the UK Public Interest Disclosure Act, is now being tightened further and will probably be replaced — yet there’s ongoing political tension about this. See the briefing document at the end of this article.

I was accused of not performing well enough, after 20 years of service and after I helped make hundreds of millions of pounds, euros and dollars of profit for the closely held firm that’s astonishingly important systematically to the global financial industry — and yet gets hardly any media scrutiny. The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank last week shows these types of financial-infrastructure firms need closer scrutiny, not less.

That’s especially true as money moves increasingly quickly around the world.

The world’s failure to embark on a climate transition more aggressively and carefully has meant we are now still too reliant on fossil fuels, which are largely bought and sold in rigged markets. Had we transitioned earlier, as my reporting in 2005-2015 showed we should, markets would be incentivising cleaner economies at a faster pace, the Russia-Ukraine war might have been avoided and the cost-of-living crisis would be less brutal, especially for the world’s most vulnerable.

Now, as things stand, vast swathes of the world might become uninhabitable without constant air conditioning and there is a serious risk of massive immigration, as well as political-and-financial-system collapse. This is not woke hyperbole. This is reality.

🌏

The one graph that I would like every politician in the world to look at.

Just ten seconds, then they will understand.

(And let those politicians for whom this is too complicated make room for the next generation)#ClimateEmergency MT @CarbonBriefpic.twitter.com/y02PJQNK4F

— Alexander Verbeek 🌍 (@Alex_Verbeek) January 15, 2020

It’s important to call out bad corporate behavior.

It’s important to call out bad behavior by the judiciary and lawyers.

It’s important to call out bad treatment of whistleblowers, especially in the context of me dealing with whistleblowing law that the current UK government itself says needs improving — and indeed it is seeking to improve it.

Further, that same government says there needs to be better protection for journalists and researchers against lawfare (the act of engaging in litigation in a bid to suppress scrutiny of corporations or billionaires). Bloomberg LP is owned by Mike Bloomberg, former New York City mayor and Democratic presidential candidate.

So, it’s important to call out lawfare, otherwise known as strategic litigation against public participation (SLAPP).

My case is lawfare because Bloomberg began the dispute while I was working there. I tried for many years from within to get the company, effectively the US government’s state media unit, to improve its coverage of the climate crisis and of solutions such as better market structure.

I believe Bloomberg LP’s behavior has been motivated at least partly to protect its fossil-fuel money (more than $1 billion a year I estimate), limit my public participation, hurt my reputation. That strategy has worked. The process has strained my mental health almost three years after initiating the claim (and for several years before that while at the company). Still, it’s true that not all my reporting and ideas have been ignored.

This canal art sums up my state of mind

Source: East London graffiti. Photo: CarrZee

I’m now seeking to shine some more light on how we got here, given the UK judiciary is apparently not willing to deal with my claims properly and it has published court documents the past several weeks (in a very weird fashion it has to be said — warning — there are many mistakes in the official government documents). And now I’m not even sure the respondent in my case (Bloomberg LP) has defended it properly. Bloomberg is now pretty much ghosting me.

There is massive confusion about the case numbers in my case, for instance; documents appear to change form

Note: I’ve requested the tribunals’ and Bloomberg’s help to get my head around these

Up until now, I’ve removed some of the names of the Bloomberg executives in my published stories because I don’t want to appear retaliatory.

I really don’t — even if I believe some executives were probably vengeful against me for calling out their bad behavior and for requesting newsroom improvement that the firm didn’t want to make at the time of my requests. It did make some changes two years later or still has not made the needed changes.

Plus, it is important to recognize that the executives named in the published documents below might have been doing what they were told rather than being complete masters of their own bad behavior.

Now that the Tribunal has published most of the names, I don’t see why I should keep them out of the public sphere, creating unnecessary mystery and potentially assisting with what already is a highly sophisticated series of cover ups, I contend. Those publications of the decisions have generated news coverage that I deem is unfair and that damages my reputation.

The following legal documents published for the first time are a fair representation of how I filed them (with some typos fixed, language smoothed, sections summarized and emphasis added (bold and underlined) and context added {} curly brackets to help non-legal-focussed readers.

While there are mistakes in the documents published by the UK government, I believe all the information in my documents (presented below) is correct, yet I am relying on others as I make some of the assertions.

I’m not saying the arguments I made were perfect, good, or even well organized and complete. The litigation was complicated and I contend it was made more complicated than it needed to be because that was Bloomberg’s deliberate legal strategy.

The litigation has reached a point where this publication should not be in contempt of the tribunal and there is no jury — I’m still fighting an order to pay Bloomberg £10,000 of its costs. To be fair, Bloomberg does not seem to be chasing me hard for this money and I won’t go into that particular issue below.

I know I could have done better at the litigation (given what has happened in the past three years and from what I now know about my states of mind when I filed the documents). Remember, it’s a tried and tested strategy for a group of corporate gaslighters to confuse the gaslit, turning the victim into the perpetrator.

Here is the decision to dismiss my case for unfair dismissal, against which I asked for the review (see below). I also publish the request for review of the decision to strike out my whistleblowing below that (both also provided for download, below).

For instance, note this section in the decision to strike out my whistleblowing (p26) — I added underline emphasis:

---

As formulated in {Bloomberg’s} cross-appeal, the essence of Ground 1 appears from paragraph 6.4, where it is said that in order for a disclosure to be a qualifying disclosure {qualifying whistleblowing} within limb (1)(e): 

“… 

6.4.1 the information disclosed must be of specific damage to a specific environment rather than environmental damage in general, and/or 

6.4.2 in order for the maker of the disclosure to have a reasonable belief that the disclosure is in the public interest, the information must: 

6.4.2.1 have an element of novelty; or 

6.4.2.2 relate to specific damage to a specific environment. 

…” 

83. It was said that the ET had erred in law in not applying that approach. Thus, as formulated in this document, the respondent was submitting that this was criteria that must be met in order for the statutory definition to be satisfied. 

84. However, in the course of his oral submissions, Mr Laddie substantially revised this ground. 

---

Is it just me who is concerned here that Mr James Laddie Kings Counsel of Matrix Chambers, one of the most powerful employment lawyers in Britain, is arguing on behalf of Bloomberg, one of the most powerful financial companies on earth, that the climate is not a specific enough environment to whistleblow about?

Now that I’ve lost my litigation, does that mean others can take this “non landmark” decision of this appeal court and make this same argument in courts around the world?

There are scores of other examples of bad thinking in these decisions where the judiciary is not understanding climate science and market economics. I’m publishing this today as an open letter to reporters, lawyers, judges and policy makers everywhere to examine these decisions. I need help to parse this.

You might think I’m being conspiratorial, not accepting the umpires’ rulings.

Please read and examine the evidence and the (lack of) logic and decide for yourself. I’m not asking you to take my word for it.

Still, hopefully my word will get you started. Search for “Bloomberg” on my website CarrZee.org (the search bars are on the right or — on mobile devices — at the bottom of stories).

The main hearing in my litigation took place in London from Dec. 6-10, 2021 and the decision was read out Dec. 13, 2021. The earlier EAT decision to throw out my 38 pages of whistleblowing was taken a single business day earlier, on Dec. 3, 2021 and I had no official written record of that decision until many months later. (I did have a transcript provided by Bloomberg that I knew contained errors – I didn’t know where the errors were so they could have been anywhere.)

On procedure alone the litigation amounted to a miscarriage of justice against a (mainly self-litigating) claimant / whistleblower.

Both the upper and lower tribunals denied my requests for review.

(More to come. Feedback to mathew@carrzee.net)

My Request for Review to the London Central Employment Tribunal

London employment Tribunal CASE NUMBERs: 2203206/2020 & 2205003/2020

Related case in the EAT: Re Appeal No EA-2021-000784-AT 

IN THE LONDON CENTRAL EMPLOYMENT TRIBUNAL

B E T W E E N:

MR MATHEW CARR

V

BLOOMBERG LP

&

BLOOMBERG UK LIMITED

Feb. 8, 2022

• Here are my grounds for requesting review of the Dec. 13, 2021 decision in my case. Please read this in conjunction with the application to resist the Respondent’s application for 40,000 pounds in costs, sent to the Tribunal on Feb. 3 {I believe the timing of that application was designed to put me off requesting a review and/or appealing}, including ALL the attachments sent then, including the EAT request for review.

There is still no official transcript of the EAT decision from Dec. 3 {That has since turned up — see link, above}.

A request for review may not require “grounds,” but I thought it might be useful to use this framework, for clarity.

Happy to take feedback.

• References

[Square brackets] = reference to the main hearing bundle {about 1,800 pages}

Xx. Numbers with full points = reference to Judge’s decision apparently sent on Jan. 25 {2022}

(xx) Numbers of paragraphs / sections of this request for review

Grounds on which to request a review of the decision

• At 18. the Tribunal said: “With the whistleblowing complaints being stuck (sic{should be “struck”}) out, the remaining factual and legal issues in the case were much narrower and required far less time to investigate.”

Failure to thoroughly test dismissal reason. Ground 1 Cover up 1

• This is an error of law. The Tribunal knew it still needed to answer: what was the reason, or if more than one – the principal reason, for the claimant’s dismissal?

And it failed to do so properly. At the beginning of the six-day hearing, the Respondent’s {Bloomberg’s King’s Counsel, then Queen’s Counsel James Laddie} QC and the Judge both commented that because there was no whistleblowing there were no detriments.

That assumption was false. The judge had an obligation to look at the detriments, and how they occurred after the whistleblowing, which was not only against the whistleblowing law, but against the core guide of the Respondent. {To be clear, deploying detriments against a whistleblower is against the UK whistleblowing law}. {Had the judge looked at the detriments,} That would have allowed the Tribunal to see the real reason for the firing. {that is…I was fired because of the whistleblowing}

The word “detriment” was used only once in the 227 paragraphs of the decision.

Failure to properly consider the about 20 claimed detriments and 10 unclaimed detriments is Ground 1.1.

• As a self litigant, I assumed that when the Judge said he had or would read the evidence and it should be “taken as read” — that he was telling me I didn’t need to repeat it in court.

Mr Will Kennedy admitted he had not seen the Respondent’s whistleblowing policy when cross examined in the Tribunal at the hearing. That clearly shows the Respondent has not properly set up a system for protecting whistleblowers.

All four of the Respondent’s witnesses had memory lapses about important verbal conversations between them and with others. I contend their evasiveness should have been taken into account by the Tribunal.

Had the Tribunal undertaken its role properly, it would have recognised that the principal reason for the dismissal was indeed the whistleblowing.

Failure to Provide Candid Witnesses: Ground 2; Cover Up 2

(6) At 20., the Tribunal said “the reason for the respondent {Bloomberg LP} not calling those witnesses was to avoid them being cross-examined on relevant issues in the case, he could invite the Tribunal to draw adverse inferences from that fact {I assume this means me, Mathew Carr and I did indeed invite the Tribunal thusly}. I also explained that the claimant had the right to apply for a witness order and the basis upon which the Tribunal would decide any such application.”

I contended at the hearing that the Tribunal should draw adverse inferences (or words to the effect), yet the Judge hasn’t done so. That’s an error of law because it shows the true cause of dismissal wasn’t tested by the Tribunal.

Ms Emma Ross-Thomas {Managing editor energy and commodities EMEA – she fired me} didn’t remember any conversations with her boss Mr Will Kennedy {Senior Executive Editor, Energy and Commodities at Bloomberg} about my “disciplinary procedure”. This is not credible.

Mr Kennedy didn’t remember either. Mr Landberg {now U.K. Economy Team Leader at Bloomberg News – previously head of the EU natgas, power and carbon team and my boss} continued intermittently to hold meetings with me in a deliberate attempt to shield her from more knowledge of my whistleblowing. She barely ever approached me, I believe, except about missed auctions of EU carbon allowances.

{Ross-Thomas also was not truthful about whether I mentioned the whistleblowing to her – which I did specifically on AT LEAST two occasions — once at the end of a face-to-face meeting in Bloomberg’s new headquarters in London and a second time in a direct email sent shortly before I was fired — Bloomberg has repeatedly refused to provide the email during 18 months of disclosure for the litigation. A key reason why Bloomberg was able to argue my sacking had to do with my competence was by arguing Ross-Thomas didn’t know about the whistleblowing. The Tribunal believed her and not me even though it didn’t say my evidence lacked credibility.}

Ms Cotterill of HR couldn’t remember who she spoke to in management after speaking with me in 2018. She couldn’t remember basic statistics about how many employees succeed through performance improvement procedures and could not remember how Bloomberg’s systems compared with the “other banks” she worked at previously. {Note she accidently referred to Bloomberg as a bank – you could not make it up}. Indeed, she could not clearly answer most of the questions asked during {my} cross examination {of her}.

It was impossible to tell from her oral evidence how genuine the PIP {performance improvement program} was and I say that shows it was deeply flawed. Also, the fact that the Respondent chose Ms Cotterill as its HR witness further demonstrates {that there was a} cover up. Ms Lucy Mills (also of HR) and Mr Aaron Canty {now global head of employee relations} were much more involved (and conflicted) in my dismissal. See below.

The way Mr Reed Landberg used his body language to ask {Bloomberg} representatives at the back of the room “Am I saying the right thing?” during cross examination indicates the witnesses were probably coached. At this point I was asking about why Mr Landberg was temporarily shifted out of my management line while I was fired. And mechanics of how and what were the motivations

I contend he was shifted in his role because the Respondent was seeking to cover up the real reason for my sacking. The Tribunal has failed to see through the Respondent’s carefully choreographed machinations, as it’s required to do because of the Jhuti case law, which is ground 3.

Jhuti case law not applied properly: Ground 3, (Related) Cover Up 3

(7) This was a carefully planned operation to prevent me from joining these executives into the litigation and getting justice. It worked, and multiple Tribunals should have seen through it and didn’t. I’m not surprised. It was probably one of the most sophisticated unfair dismissals in global corporate history.

(8) See this on the Littleton Chambers website {Littletons briefly helped represent me in the litigation}:

Perhaps the best guidance for practitioners to be taken from the decision is to heed the words of HHJ Taylor in Fairhill and recognise that Jhuti shall rarely be a case that needs to be considered by the Employment Tribunal at all.

Despite the Jhuti situation being unusual, the case is relied upon in pretty much every appeal where there is any issue about decision makers.  The arguments about decisions and decision maker have become ever more Baroque; often unnecessarily so.

The paradigm of the single decision maker who dismisses for a clearly expressed reason will often apply where the employer has a legitimate reason for dismissal. If an employer really has determined to rid themselves of a whistleblower the process may be complex and involve people who are keen to appear not to have been involved in the decision making; someone who wishes to ensure an employee is dismissed because of their whistle blowing is likely to try to keep to the shadows. Wrongdoers often wish to distance themselves from their decisions. It would be troubling if in such cases excessively complex arguments about the difficulty in determining the precise mental processes of all those involved in the process resulted in a valid claim failing. Fortunately, we can rely on the good sense of the members of employment tribunals to see through such ruses and get to grips with the reason that operated, however it got there, on the mind of the dismissing officer.

In my case, the Tribunal failed to get to grips with it on multiple occasions, I contend, including when I sought to join individuals to this litigation last year{2020}. Also, see above where Mr Landberg’s body language gave the game away, I contend. See ground 15.

Taking Advantage of a Self Litigant: Ground 4

(9) The Respondent deliberately took advantage of my status as a self litigant and the Tribunal should have seen through this after my financial resources were severely drained during the first years of litigation.

Since the legs of my litigation {the 38 pages of detailed whistleblowing}were pulled from me the previous Friday, the Tribunal should have considered whether I was being discriminated against because of my belief that climate should be protected; whether detriments amounted to an effective breach of my employment contract. I had no time to explore these avenues (well, I had one already stressful weekend).

 The Tribunal erred when it denied my application to stay judgement for a day or two on Dec. 13. This is Ground 4.5 {The tribunal and indeed Bloomberg’s legal team had an obligation to ensure the litigation was not lopsided, a big problem in the British legal system.}

Defensive Lawfare

This is not a ground because lawfare is lawful in Britain (well …everywhere as far as I know {but some countries have some rules deterring it}), even if it’s under increasing scrutiny by lawmakers and regulators.

Lawfare is the notion that companies and wealthy individuals use spurious litigation, or the legal system, to intimidate claimants and journalists/whistleblowers out of scrutinising their activities.

Lawfare is the weaponized use of the law to annihilate a political or business enemy.

In this case it’s about discouraging investigation of the Respondent’s {Bloomberg LP’s} role in climate damage and conflicts of interests in relation to its multiple roles in multiple important markets across the world.

It’s “defensive” because the Respondent may argue I started the claim.

I argue the respondent started the dispute in mid 2019 when it turned my whistleblowing that I made on {Bloomberg’s outside} whistleblowing “hotline” or web portal into a “grievance” … then successfully and erroneously struck out the whistleblowing as whistleblowing by cross appealing my appeal to the Employment Appeal Tribunal two years later.

{BTW it was Mr Aaron Canty who oversaw this beginning of the dispute in the middle of 2019 and he is now one of the big bosses of Human Resources at Bloomberg News}

This decision to trick me into starting a grievance in 2019 is something the Tribunal should have seen through and tested properly using the evidence that it said it read. Its failure to do so is Ground 5

Failing to see grievance trick: Ground 5, Cover up 4

(11) Turning whistleblowing into a grievance also amounts to covering up …or “gaslighting” because it turns the victim (the whistleblower who should have been protected) into the villain.

{There is an official name for this — DARVO stands for “Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.” The perpetrator or offender may Deny the behavior, Attack the individual doing the confronting, and Reverse the roles of Victim and Offender such that the perpetrator assumes the victim role and turns the true victim — or the whistleblower — into an alleged offender. This occurs, for instance, when an actually guilty perpetrator assumes the role of “falsely accused” and attacks the accuser’s credibility and blames the accuser of being the perpetrator of a false accusation.

And it even made it into the cartoon South Park

See link above – I didn’t include this South Park section in my request for review as I hadn’t noticed it then}

So, it’s unlawful whistleblower harassment and the Tribunal should have seen it, even if I didn’t argue it perfectly at the time.

Failure to recognize this corporate strategy amounts to the Tribunal system enabling lawfare, I contend.

It’s a particularly effective strategy against mentally strained, financially drained whistleblowers/journalists, I contend.

One of the key lawfare strategies is to extend the litigation over multiple years and make it cover multiple detriments and multiple points of law / areas of law. My dispute is now in its 4th year {as of last year}, which denies me the ability to get on with my life and probably help improve the quality of climate reporting. I contend the Respondent’s lawfare is also probably predatory delay of climate action.

Komarov Testimony Denied: Ground 6, Cover up 5

At 21., the Tribunal said of my bid to get Mr Alexei Komarov {former Bloomberg employee} to testify as a witness: “It {sic should be In} short, it was totally irrelevant to the issues I needed to decide in this case”

This is an incorrect application of the facts to the law. Had the Tribunal allowed this witness, it would have had corroborating evidence about the real reason for my dismissal, which was persecution of a whistleblower in order to deter others from scrutinising wealthy corporations. (Related to Ground 1)

Failing to see these links, join the dots, if you like, amounts to the Tribunal effectively covering up bad corporate behaviour (in this case persecution of whistleblowers highlighting problems in the Respondent’s reporting on climate [Carr] and its reporting on dividends [Komarov].)

I genuinely can’t remember whether the Respondent objected to Mr Komarov’s testimony — I think it did. If it did, that was another cover up, I contend.

Reierson Testimony Denied: Ground 7, Cover up 6

By denying the Tribunal evidence from Mr Andy Reierson {energy markets editor at Bloomberg LP} (22. of the judgement), the Tribunal denied itself an opportunity to investigate the real reason for my dismissal. So, it’s related to Ground 1. Mr Reierson was the editor I had most dealings with.

At 24.1, I already covered this question that the Tribunal needed to deal with, above. At 24.2, the judge says: Another question it needs to answer: if the respondent can show that it was a potentially fair reason (the respondent advanced reason was the claimant’s poor performance), whether in the circumstances of the case the responded {sic the respondent} acted reasonably or unreasonably in treating that reason as sufficient to dismiss the claimant (s.94 ERA)?

Dismissal wasn’t fair given the wider picture, and even assuming that the striking out of the whistleblowing was legitimate (which I don’t accept it was).

Firing Wasn’t a Fair Option; Ground 8

(14) Here is a short, random summary list of examples of unreasonable behaviour by the respondent, which I contend overrides its right to take a decision to fire me (also see my email earlier this month resisting the Respondent’s cost application):

*The Respondent didn’t provide the protection it should have provided

*Three managers colluded to bully me, stop me collaborating properly, which was against the Respondent’s bystander policy and anti-bullying policies

*It ignored by allegations I was being badly managed and doubled down as I blew the whistle

*I contend the Respondent deliberately siloed my whistleblowing to place pressure on me to resign, leave me open to retaliation, make it easy to set up a defence for this litigation, which I contend it knew was coming about two years before I even contemplated it {see section near the end, below}

*The Respondent failed to investigate its own grievance properly

*The Respondent indeed used the investigation to cover up its behaviour (see below)

*It failed to have any good reason to place me on the performance-improvement plan

*It failed to conduct the PIP properly on multiple fronts; See my appeals

*It shuffled its managers to blur the lines of blame

*It continued to cover up is flawed processes well after I was fired

*It deliberately distracted me away from this Tribunal by pretending to hold a further internal investigation post dismissal

*It “accidently or on purpose” delayed discovery of facts (eg my performance vs peers)

*It “accidentally or on purpose” inserted mistakes in news copy, applying pressure on me

*It was clear to one of my team colleagues that I was “not a favourite” of my team leader Reed Landberg [862]

*It “accidentally or on purpose” made mistakes in the bundles (eg A misplaced Navex page that was clearly specific whistleblowing, eg B last few pages of the 660 page bundle for the interim relief bundle)

*It “accidentally or on purpose” made mistakes on outside health consultant reports

*It “accidentally or on purpose” made mistakes in key summary documents for the Tribunal (eg leaving out in the summary chronology the day that Mr Reed Landberg and Mr Will Kennedy placed me on my second Performance Improvement Plan — July 12, 2019.

*It failed to hold PIP meetings properly after the third period.

*It effectively failed to give me a further chance to improve after my “final warning” while pretending to give me that chance

*It “accidentally or on purpose” corrupted presentation of my Oil’s Twilight story on the website before manager Will Kennedy brazenly used the story without giving me credit, apparently in his pitch to help lead the Bloomberg Green team, a job he knew I was interested in

I contend many of these amount to lawfare.

The Tribunal didn’t place adequate weight on these factors above, which is a misapplication of the employment law to the facts. Those facts are in the evidence. Even if the hearings in this case are disjointed and rushed somewhat, the Tribunal had access to much of this evidence for almost two years in my claims and witness statements. The Respondent has access to this since circa 2015. I’m certainly not arguing I did a perfect job in my litigation, nor did I say I was a perfect reporter.

The judicial system has an obligation to level the playing field in litigation that includes for self litigants. It failed in that obligation. That’s Ground 8.5.

Whistleblower Protection Denied not Given Enough Weight: Key Ground 9, Cover Up 7

(15) I asked in June 2019 Mr Aaron Canty, a lawyer and a senior executive in Bloomberg’s HR department, are you rejecting my application for “whistleblower protection”?

He responds saying “We don’t grant/ deny whistleblower status.” Notice the crafty shift in language? Had Mr Canty said ”we don’t provide whistleblower protection” it would have been the same as saying “We don’t abide by the UK whistleblowing law,” so he didn’t quite say that. I argue what he said was unreasonable and it shows the Respondent knew I was a litigation risk before I even contemplated litigation. [738-739]

This amounts to covering up the whistleblowing rather than offering protection. This is also blatant gaslighting, where a victim is turned into the villain in the vein of “you are bad for pursuing this”, “you are bad for caring about the environment, not just money,” “you are bad for calling us out,” when I thought I was seeking to protect the Respondent’s reputation, especially in the future, when the climate crisis is going to get much worse, and it probably will.

Bloomberg is based in New York and the USA, with 4% of the world’s population, is most to blame for crisis, based on emissions history. And it still has one of the biggest emissions per capita.

Source: Carbon Brief

Grievance investigation that became a cover up; Key Ground 10, Cover Up 8

August 9, 2019: The example of Laura Zelenko, standards editor, was explained in section No. 46 of my witness statement and is also at [861]. It was also argued in Sept.  2021. This example was not brought up at the last minute, as the Tribunal said in the judgement, which is evidence the evidence was properly assessed (see lawfare section).

This is Ground 11

This is the Precise Moment Bloomberg Covered Up My Climate Whistleblowing (3)

The point I was making was that Zelenko concluded that the stories she investigated were flawed.

She found of the specific crude oil-market / oil-industry-expansion stories I sent: “It’s true some of the stories could have benefited from that context” (the climate-impact context would have benefitted those specific stories).

But she never said that when she sent sentences for use by the managers of the grievance process, which I contend wasn’t really independent.

She twisted the words slightly but unreasonably from the specific to the banal, words that didn’t include that crucial, specific conclusion.

She said to the {grievance-}investigation managers that the Respondent’s reporting could benefit from vague climate context in some vague future:

“I’ve reviewed our coverage and while I believe certain oil industry stories could benefit from more context on climate, there’s no evidence that such information was omitted intentionally because of a bias or conspiracy. We have sufficient coverage related to climate change and its impact and, perhaps more importantly, have a whole department in editorial & research dedicated to new energy finance. We also are preparing to establish a robust team focused entirely on climate issues globally. The input is constructive and worth considering but I don’t believe reflects an institutional bias favoring fossil fuels.”

(I include it in full for the Tribunal’s convenience.)

‘This two-year legal dispute could have been avoided and the seven-year employment dispute could have been cut short right there had she been honest about what she found‘

Because I kept thinking investigating managers would investigate properly, I wasn’t willing to just walk away.

Further, the Respondent unreasonably failed to deal with my bullying allegations, then Mr Aaron Canty tricked me out of pursuing a second grievance close to my dismissal date of May 13, 2020 (officially May 20). The Tribunal failed to apply employment law properly to those facts, it failed to place enough weight on that evidence and …

…that’s Ground 12 of this request for review

He {Mr Canty} then attempted to cover up the flaws in the process by inserting and disclosing documents at the last minute into the litigation process [1611A-C] {or failing to disclose documents at all – such as emails that showed my dismissing manager knew about my whistleblowing and documents that would have showed my performance was great vs colleagues}

Biased executives: Tribunal didn’t place enough weight on bias in the termination process; Ground 13, cover up 9

(17) The Respondent kept using biased managers to harass me even though it had plenty of managers it could have put me under. These include (but not exhaustive):

*Ms Lucy Mills (who put me on the PIP in 2016 and was there right at the end bullying me, I contend …in my final meeting and beyond)

*Mr Will Kennedy talented (yet as a manager too cowardly to … behave badly directly …while {probably} directing others to do dirty work and stand by.) He placed me on a PIP in 2016 and I now contend was after me until the end/ threatened by me.

*Mr Stuart Wallace pretend friend who thought nothing of using my best work against me and [he pretended] those stories were bad. He also either didn’t know in 2019 that pension funds were concerned about climate, or pretended not to know.

*Mr Reed Landberg, talented yet ultimately a yes-man bully, micromanaged me for a year…he was still bullying me right to the end, eg pretending a meeting I called was an official “one-on-one” under the PIP {performance improvement plan}; He and Emma Ross-Thomas pretended not to know about my whistleblowing.

*Mr Aaron Canty HR, pretend friend while setting me up for potentially life-threatening stress, looking at it negatively

While promising to absorb the evidence, the Tribunal didn’t see through this dismissive, bullying behaviour for almost two stressful years. These biases are also part of the cover up because of their detrimental impact on my mental health {which reduces the chance I will be in a fit-enough state to hold these gaslighters to account}.

Performance metrics warped and underplayed; Ground 14

The Tribunal failed to place enough weight on my surging performance metrics in 2018 and 2019, despite the pressure {that I was suffering at the time} from managers. Key metrics such as “top worldwide screen” stories were heading up {that is, my performance was improving} and the Tribunal failed to place much emphasis on them.

From [216]: “Previously (but not this year) much emphasis was placed on the breaking news and topww metrics. Mine jumped about 60% and 30% y/y respectively in 2018. Given that, is it appropriate that each of my managers declined to back up how they concluded my performance was “steady at the low end of what’s expected’’?”

{Plus I contend bloomberg repeatedly failed to produce accurate performance metrics for the years 2014-2020, so Bloomberg by publishing this in March 2023 I’m giving you a chance to come clean.}

Upper-level conspiracy; Ground 15

(19) While praising me for “uncovering” the high-level, upper management “high water mark” conspiracy that I was to be got rid of more than six months before I was put on the performance improvement plan (PIP), the Tribunal then apparently failed to place much weight on that, even though it shows the process was a sham.

It was dismissive in saying the managers knew I was an underperformer. The truth is they knew I was a great performer calling them out on bad behavior. The Tribunal erred in not finding that amounted to gross unfairness in my dismissal.

While writing this request for review, I’ve realized there’s plenty of other matters the Tribunal failed to address and I have not chased yet: injury to feelings, aggravated damages, how my computer plays up close to litigation deadline (It’s doing this now here near midnight on Feb. 8, 2022.)

There’s even a helicopter buzzing. Knife crime, my kids are saying. Nothing to do with the Respondent, of course. But you see what seven years of this does, folks?

It’s apparent that the Respondent’s lawfare might even extend to examining my psychology over many years and knowing how I would react to their management “games.”

The importance of the Respondent’s influence should not be underestimated and my suggestion that there might be benefits from breaking it up should not be dismissed lightly. {The Tribunal seems to be dismissive}.

This dismissiveness is Ground 16

Why does the Tribunal make big decisions really quickly and take so long to make small ones, or react to claimant’s concerns, applications? This is a question the Tribunal system might ask itself.

I hope the Tribunal can look again at all the evidence and rethink its decision.

Thanks for your time,

Mathew Carr

Feb. 8, 2022

---

And for those still with me … here is my request for a review of the earlier decision made to strike out my whistleblowing (see link above for that decision and PDF below):

My Request for Review of Employment Appeal Tribunal’s Decision that it Made on Dec. 3, 2021

WARNING NOTE: THE DOCUMENT BELOW IS MOSTLY HOW I FILED IT — WITH ADDED CONTEXT: READERS SHOULD READ UNDER CAUTION BECAUSE I DIDN’T HAVE ACCESS TO THE FINAL WRITTEN DOCUMENT FROM THE COURT, WHICH DID NOT TURN UP UNTIL ABOUT NINE MONTHS LATER. I’M PUBLISHING THIS NOW IN MARCH 2023 TO BOOST TRANSPARENCY IN THIS LEGAL PROCESS AND HAVE INCLUDED EXTRACTS FROM THE NEW JUDGEMENT TRANSCRIPT IN SOME CASES

CASE REF: EA-2021-000784-RN

Related cases in Central London Employment Tribunal: 2205003/2020 2203206/2020

IN THE EMPLOYMENT APPEAL TRIBUNAL

BETWEEN:

MR M. CARR Appellant — and BLOOMBERG L.P. Respondent

Claimant’s request for review of related decisions handed down by the EAT from 3rd December, 2021 to Jan. 10, 2022

Date: Jan. 18, 2022

• This application is mainly in two sections, the first examines flaws in the EAT’s decision in the above matter and / or the transcript, which should be considered in the review, followed by a list of how the tribunal and EAT should have applied the whistleblowing statute and case law {in section 2}.

• I attempt to cross reference the grounds, where appropriate.

• A final section 3 at the end adds some other grounds, for clarity and to move closer toward completeness.

• This document’s complicated because the Respondent has deliberately made the litigation complicated to distract from its bad behaviour, I contend.

Section 1

Ground 1

• The oral decision as delivered on Dec. 3 contained errors and / or it was not clear enough and / or not organised well enough — the “Take Note” transcript (of the orally presented words) provided by the Respondent {Bloomberg} prevents me ({mostly} a self litigant) from confidently requesting this review, because it contains errors, including the spelling of Mr Fraher’s name on page 7.

• I reserve the right to adjust this once the official transcript is produced.

Ground 2

• The Dec. 3 decision was made under difficult circumstances and it was by necessity rushed {since then I’ve come to believe that the timing of the hearings might have been carefully planned to place pressure on me}.

• See this from page 2 of “take note” – it shows the inappropriately rushed nature of the decision, which was largely beyond the EAT’s control {maybe}:

• {Justice Heather Williams sitting}: The parties were keen for the cross appeal to be heard and to have my decision before the commencement of the substantive hearing. However, the hearing only took place on Wednesday 1st December, and counsels’ submissions took the whole court day. I was then involved in hearing a different case on the 2nd December and in the circumstances, the only solution in terms of delivering a decision before the substantive merits hearing commences, was for me to give a read-out judgment on Friday 3rd December as I am now duly doing.

• At the top of page 14 of Take Note clearly has errors because it does not make logical sense:

• “Mr Laddie also submitted that the reasons identified by the Employment Judge for not striking out the 1e limb allegations in relation to protected disclosures 4, 5 and/or 6 were where he appeared to be exercising a discretion where [were?] legally irrelevant and flawed and that the Employment Tribunal should [not?] substitute its own decision, accepting that this tribunal only has the power to do so when only one lawful conclusion is possible.”
  
  

Messing with language

Final judgement version (September 2022 see below), which seems to take advantage of my editing suggestions: Mr Laddie also submitted that the reasons identified by the Employment Judge for not striking out the limb (1)(e) allegations in relation to Protected Disclosures 4, 5 and/or 6, where he appeared to be exercising a discretion, were legally irrelevant so that the exercise of the discretion was flawed; and, accordingly, the EAT should substitute its own decision. He accepted that this tribunal can only do so where just one lawful conclusion is possible. 

• {Two outcomes were possible in this case. In September 2021, the Employment Appeal Tribunal had said the following: That I had a “seriously arguable” case that my emails to the head of Bloomberg News John Micklethwait and others amounted to whistleblowing. That was the view of the EAT’s John Bowers QC now KC, deputy judge of the High Court.}

{I contend that — yes — the lower Tribunal’s decision to strike out some of my whistleblowing was flawed and should not have been allowed}

• The section of Justice Williams apparent words at the bottom of page 14 exposed the EAT’s inadequate analysis:

• In relation to Mr Laddie’s 2nd and 3rd factors, they appear to be matters which are highly pertinent. To take an obvious example, an alleged disclosure made to a HR manager is less likely to satisfy the public interest test than a disclosure to a person or body that has powers in relation to environmental issues and some responsibility for acting or some ability to cause whatever concern is being raised to cease. Additionally, it appears to me that the extent to which an act or omission is identified in the alleged disclosure and the nature of that act is also likely to be relevant. To take one obvious example, the test is more likely to be satisfied by a specific communication about a company dumping toxic waste in a river than it is a general observation that the polar ice caps are melting. {from “take note”}
  
  {From published decision: “To take another obvious example, the test is more likely to be satisfied by a specific communication about a company that is dumping toxic waste in a particular river than it is by a general observation that the polar icecaps are melting”}
  
  {This shows how the EAT failed to understand climate science because the polar ice caps melting signifies environmental damage just as toxic waste in a river or a “particular river” does.}

• Had the EAT analysed correctly, it would have better applied the toxic-waste-in- a-river example that it mentions is “obvious.” The Respondent was being paid by society (banks, governments, energy companies, industry) as a news organisation that should report relevant news — that it would alert to the multiple “users of the river” about the danger of the toxic waste in that river. Other users could in that obvious example case include fisherman, drinking-water companies, food makers, farmers.

• In my case the “toxic waste” was greenhouse gas emissions being dumped into everyone’s atmosphere by the Respondents’ clients and those funding them, rather than a river.

Clearly more than one lawful conclusion was possible.

This is Ground 3

• The Respondent purporting at least periodically to be one the most influential organisations on earth had a responsibility to alert people about substantial risks to markets, including climate change — that is: its clients and; to the extent of its website reach, most people on earth.

My whistleblowing was directed with appropriate precision I contend because Bloomberg LP was in a position to flag the toxic waste to its investor customers when publishing news about fossil fuels. Investors turn to Bloomberg LP first when deciding where to invest. They don’t turn to environmental regulators or even to financial conduct regulators.

This is Ground 4

The conclusion by the EAT should have been that my case is indeed very similar to the EAT’s “one obvious example”.

• Near the bottom of page 16, the EAT said this:

Mr Wynne {Mr Carr’s representative} submits insofar as this or other disclosures, assert or propose that the Respondent should be doing better in relation to coverage of stories related to carbon and related topics, this implied that its current coverage is damaging the environment. I do not accept it is arguable that this implication is conveyed from the material that I have referred to.

• If I am wrong about that and that implication was conveyed, it could only be in the most generalised way and would not meet the Kilraine requirement for factual content and specificity.

The examples listed below show how both the lower and upper tribunals have incorrectly overlooked the specificity in the 38 pages of whistleblowing, which clearly is a misapplication of the facts in this case to the statute and case law.

This is Ground 5

For instance, limiting stories on carbon markets restricts the Respondent’s clients’ ability to prepare for climate policy that will reduce damage to the environment. “It could only be in the most generalised way” is clearly incorrect on any thorough, or even near-thorough, analysis of the 38 pages of content.

• At the bottom of page 16, the EAT says:

As regards this part of the case, as is apparent from paragraph 42, the Employment Judge was unable to identify any material in the email which met element 1 and nor did he give any reason to say the Claimant might succeed in establishing this at trial. Accordingly, there was an error in failing to apply the Kilrane [sic] test for the reasons that I have given in relation to this, I consider as well that in relation to element 1, the test for strikeout is satisfied.

• Any proper application of Kilraine should have demonstrated to the EAT that the alleged whistleblowing was legitimate and I as whistleblower should have been protected. Even a superficial application of Kilraine would have argued against strike out because of the face-value specificity, which I detail below in the name of a little thoroughness…

• Mr Wynne’s argumentation at the hearing on my behalf did set this up, yet it was ignored {or underplayed} by the EAT: The lower tribunal erred at paragraphs 37 – 40 and 50, when it concluded that what the Claimant disclosed could only be characterised as “opinion”.
  
  This appears to adopt the approach in Cavendish rather than the approach in Kilraine, where the Court of Appeal held that the correct assessment was whether there was “sufficient” information to show what the statute required. In any event, such an assessment is in this case is properly a matter of the resolution of disputed fact, and not appropriate for strike out except in the most exceptional of circumstances.

{This sentence above is Ground 6}

• This section at the bottom of page 17 defies logic, assuming it is noted correctly by “Take Note”:

• It is a not a situation, as Mr Justice Linden had in Twist, where he gave the Claimant time to amend his pleading before striking out, here the case has been litigated almost to trial and the Claimant has had the opportunity to fully set out his case and to amend if he wished to do so. In these circumstances, I don’t see how the position could be improved between now and trial and in those circumstances I can see no reason why strikeout should not follow from the conclusions that I have already referred to. It follows that I will allow the cross appeal in relation to ground 3 and strike out PD1.
  
  {Justice Williams from the published decision with my comments in March 2023 in {}: The most important factor in my judgment, is that I cannot see any realistic prospect of the claimant’s position improving between now and trial {the trial was to take place the following business day, so this comment is silly}. It is not a situation, by way of example, as Linden J had before him in Twist DX where it was much earlier in the litigation and he gave the claimant the opportunity to amend his pleading before striking out. {I tried to amend my pleading and that was mostly denied by the lower Tribunal and Bloomberg kept making important information disclosures right up until near the date of the December 2021 hearing that I contend it should have made much earlier in the litigation. It still has not disclosed emails that it should have done and by publishing this I give it a further chance to do the right thing} Here the case has been litigated almost to trial and the claimant has had the opportunity to fully set out his case in the pleadings, including to amend it had he wished to do so. In these circumstances, I do not see how, realistically, the position could be improved between now and trial and in those circumstances I can see no reason why strike out should not follow from the conclusions that I have already referred to.}

• I was given no time to amend my pleading but my amended witness statement was available.

• Indeed, was directed by Judge Burns of the lower Tribunal to set out my case in my updated witness statement, which I duly did.

Summary pleading section

The EAT incorrectly places weight on my summary pleading and the summary version of my whistleblowing in the Scott table (spreadsheet) that Mr Laddie for the Respondent {Bloomberg} insisted on, instead of reading and analysing all the whistleblowing as it (and the lower Tribunal) should have done.

This is Ground 7

Still, even if it (and the lower Tribunal) had analysed the passages in the Scott properly, the EAT should have decided against strike out. That it didn’t properly analyse all the whistleblowing or didn’t have time to do so is certainly no fault of a self-litigating claimant.

• Mr Laddie deliberately created flimsy legal terrain by insisting on the Scott table, then repeatedly mischaracterised what I relied on. That repeated assertion …{may be at least misleading, I contend. To be fair, using a spreadsheet to summarize whistleblowing seems to be industry standard, so Mr Laddie in following that standard could have been merely highlighting the perversity of summarizing 38 pages of detailed whistleblowing into a few spreadsheet pages then arguing the spreadsheet wasn’t specific enough}

• The Respondent argued I was to blame for the fragility – the summary of the 38 pages of A4 paper in the schedule made necessary by the spreadsheet format.

This was classic and ultimately successful litigation tactic that the EAT should have seen through (it turned me the whistleblowing victim into the villain of this story) because Judges Hodgson, Adkin and Burns, then Justice Williams of the EAT apparently ignored much of the substance in my whistleblowing.

• I said in the Scott schedule that words relied on include the following. {I never said the words in the spreadsheet were everything that I relied on}

• It wasn’t appropriate in my case to create the spreadsheet because of the sheer quantity and quality of my whistleblowing. The EAT (and lower Tribunals) should have seen through the Respondent’s disingenuous legal strategy and they repeatedly failed to do so. This was taking unfair advantage of a self litigant and is …

Ground 8

• Further, it’s not up to me as a self-litigating claimant to “improve my position” before trial {in December 2021} when I sought to do so in September {2020} and was not allowed to (at a hearing soon after I contracted Covid, by the way).

• The Tribunal and the EAT should have properly analysed the documents that have been available from the very start in May 2020, almost two years ago.

Further, when I earlier sought to update my claim and improve my position, Mr Laddie mischaracterised it as improperly changing my position. He was taking advantage of a self litigant.

A self-litigating claimant should not suffer confused allegations in this way during a legal process that’s specifically meant {in theory} to provide comfort to self litigants {and prevent lopsided court cases}.

{I contend Mr Laddie did this and the EAT failed to see through it; that’s Ground 9}

{I will give Mr Laddie a further chance to respond to my point of view}

On page 18 {of Take Note}, the EAT does not deal with my appeal grounds properly. It’s confusing why the EAT is dealing with my grounds of appeal under the heading PD2. This seems badly organised and, again casts doubt on the accuracy of the transcript and/or the rushed nature of the decision.

Its analysis of the lower Tribunal’s paragraph 41 has no logic so is wrong in law.

This is Ground 10 of this request for a review

• It said this:

Ground two [of the appeal] is specific to PD2 and is based on a phrase used by the Employment Judge in paragraph 41 of his judgment. To be clear, what is said there, ‘This is not a situation-, key facts in dispute’. It is quite plain that the Employment Judge was referring to specific issues he was being asked to decide and therefore the passage relied on for grounds 2 does not disclose any error of law.

• The full sentence from paragraph 41 of the lower Tribunal (Judge Adkin)’s decision being referred to here by the EAT is the following, (had “Take Note” / the EAT had not summarized): “This is not a situation as described in appellate authorities where key facts are in dispute, as might be the case where there is a dispute over causation of detriment or dismissal, for example.”

But my situation was exactly that. There was indeed a dispute over causation of both detriment on multiple occasions across a five-year period AND dismissal. That the EAT would write it off after a few hours of superficial analysis seems like a miscarriage of justice. Key facts were in dispute. This is Ground 11.

The lower Tribunal’s Judge Adkin and the EAT’s Justice Williams both conflated issues that should have remained separate. Yes the exact wording in this protected disclosure wasn’t in dispute, but there was a dispute on causation {of my dismissal}, which Judge Adkin and Justice Williams knew. That the EAT declined to recognise it here was an error of law. See Ground 11.

• Further down on the same page (page 18), Justice Williams said the following, according to Take Note:

• At paragraph 21 [Kilraine was outlined there] the Employment Judge had summarised the legal position and when considering PD2, as is apparent from paragraph 42, the Employment Judge applied the correct test and the Employment Judge made no reference to allegations. The reference to the Claimant’s expressions of opinion were in the context of the Employment Judge holding that those expressions of opinion did not contain information capable of meeting the statutory test.

The reading/analysis below (which should have been undertaken by the lower Tribunal and the EAT) shows how the lower Tribunal and the EAT erred in applying Kilraine and the PD2 should not have been struck out when applying the law to the set of words in PD2. My opinions amounted to specific-enough information that would have limited environmental damage, eg by placing warning on fossil-fuel- expansion stories.

This is Ground 12, related to Ground 5

Further down on p18, the EAT said: Ground 4 contends that the Employment Tribunal erred as the text of written disclosures did provide a sufficient basis to conclude that there was a reasonable prospect of success. I have already addressed this in setting out my conclusions in relation to the words used in this alleged disclosure, which need to be read in the more general observations I have already made.

• The EAT never did the analysis required by law to draw out the specificity. See below. This is another example of Ground 5 of this Request for the Review.

• The EAT said at the bottom of p18: “Ground 5 [of the appeal] contends that in three respects the guidance set out in Twist was not followed.”

• But ground 5 referred to all the Twist principles a-g — as not being followed. So this is a serious error, if the transcript is correct. {And indeed in the official final transcript by Justice Williams, while she didn’t abandon the “in three respects” wording (see p50), she blamed my advocate for them; yet she never properly addresses a-g}

• The EAT said about whether Judge Adkin undertook a mini trial: I am satisfied that he did not conduct one and did not purport to resolve disputed facts.

In fact, the lower Tribunal’s judge did erroneously undertake a mini trial, failing to place enough weight on the factual dispute over why I was dismissed {and why I suffered detriments}. I was contending it was about my whistleblowing. The lower Tribunal and the EAT assumed the Respondent’s reason (lack of capability) was correct without properly testing it, as required. So the EAT misapplied the Twist v Armes case law rules.

This is Ground 13, related to Ground 11

• A slight aside here, but related to the misguided mini-trial:

The Jhuti case law should have been applied but I was not allowed by the lower Tribunal to introduce it— I still contend my dismissal was a sophisticated set up by the Respondent over many years and should have been recognised as such by the lower tribunal judges and the EAT.

This is Ground 14

Ms Emma Ross-Thomas, who fired me, was swapped into the frame to take the heat off Mr Will Kennedy, who hired her into the job. Mr Kennedy was overseeing my managers since 2015, just before my first performance improvement process, {which I now contend was a sham, like the 2019 PIP was}

• Ms Ross Thomas knew about my whistleblowing because I told her and she was notified about it multiple times by email. Her untruthful denials simply show how flimsy the Respondent’s case is.

• Mr Kennedy’s and Ms Ross Thomas’s memory lapses under cross examination at the main hearing (the week after the EAT’s decision was handed down) exposed their pretence and the sophisticated nature of the Respondent’s cover up.

To put it another way: In Royal Mail Ltd v Jhuti, the Supreme Court decided: If a person in the hierarchy of responsibility [in my case Mr Kennedy and Mr Landberg] above the employee determines that he should be dismissed for one reason [that is, whistleblowing] but hides it behind an invented reason [capability] which the decision maker [in my case Ms Emma Ross Thomas] adopts, the reason for the dismissal is the hidden reason rather than the invented reason’.

• I believe the EAT failed to or didn’t have time to think enough about this strategy of the Respondent and /or we didn’t argue it forcefully enough.

• The EAT should have considered linkages between the Respondent’s global news and data publishing business, its worldwide scope, the nature of its important investor/ bank / industry customers, the relevant climate science covering the period from at least as far back as 1990 through 2100, the Paris climate deal’s implications, as well as the impact of markets and their existing structure, which is flawed because it fails to take account of the damage being done to the climate / environment.

• This failure by the EAT and lower Tribunal to see through the sham underpins ground 14.

• The EAT made an incorrect application of the law because it took my case “at its highest,” which cannot be applied justly: I rely on a broader context to support my claims, and on evidence that elaborates and explains the elements of my claim.

I contend that taking a claim “at its highest” on a strike out application did actually involve a summary determination of issues of fact without the full factual matrix being in play. It should have been only in the clearest of cases that alleged protected disclosures should be struck out. This is not such a case.

This is Ground 15, related to the Ground 13

• On page 19 of Take Note, the EAT says:

• Nonetheless it appears to me that the Claimant is raising an issue to be investigated and the focus is on unconscious bias. These statements are not capable of showing the respondents are concealing environmental damage or are likely to do so. The fact that someone with a cynical perspective might form the conclusion from what is unsaid that might be what is going on here, that is not the test that I can apply here. I need to see what is stated and conveyed. I take the same view in relation to the passage which Mr Wynne referred to US bias and managers not being neutral.

The conclusion is plainly wrong. A superficial analysis of my position in the firm, where “yes manism” pervades, makes it plain I would have been stupid to directly accuse my managers of being biased. By asking the question, I was giving them specific information for which I should have been protected under the PIDA law. That the tribunal and EAT fail to recognise this context is …

… my Ground 16 and related to Ground 15.

• On page 20 {of Take Note}, the EAT said this:

• Again, I have to take the communication as stated and I say that in response to Mr Wynne’s point that the Claimant was writing in a way that might receive a positive reaction from his employers.

Actually the EAT should have also considered the context — it did not have to take the communication as stated.

This is underpinning Ground 16.

• At the bottom of page 20, the EAT concludes thus:

I conclude there is no reasonable prospect of the claimant establishing that he believed that making this disclosure was in the public interest in relation to actual or likely environmental damage.

Any references to carbon emissions and the like are in general terms and very brief in the context of the overall email.

• See the analysis below of the protected disclosures in the second section, which clearly demonstrates the whistleblowing words were not “in general terms” at all.

• On the top of page 23, the EAT says this: The thrust of what is being said is that the respondents are not doing as well as they could or as well as they should but that is in my judgment still several steps removed from stating that the Respondent is causing or is likely to cause damage to the environment or saying anything that tends to show that and again, insofar it is suggested that that can somehow be implied from the text used there is no factual content or specificity.

This conclusion makes no sense, again, given the five pages of whistleblowing. It’s not removed at all, let alone “several steps removed”. See the analysis of Protected Disclosure 6 in section 2. This underpins ground 5 of this review request.

Section 2

Analysis of whistleblowing disclosures to help back up the arguments made above

Evidence pertaining to Ground 5 of this request for review:

• My 38 pages of whistleblowing included numerous specific examples of wrongdoing by the Respondent and scores of specific suggestions listing how environmental damage being directly caused by the Respondent’s clients could be averted. The EAT didn’t properly apply those examples to the statute and case law.
• {I’m not saying that the following is completely comprehensive}

My belief in the validity of my whistleblowing was reasonable because it was clearly made in the public interest (as well as with other interests in mind). The EAT didn’t properly apply this context.

This is Ground 17

See also analysis below.

• In summary, the Tribunal/s and the EAT apparently decided my whistleblowing didn’t go far enough. But that conclusion was arrived at without a thorough-enough analysis.

• A more thorough engagement with my 38 pages of words would have more appropriately applied the whistleblowing law to my disclosures. That’s why the decisions of Judge Adkin and Justice Williams, as they stand, amount to a miscarriage of justice. See Ground 5 of this review request above.

• History will probably show it, even if the EAT does not take this opportunity to review. By requesting this extension of time and an official written judgement, I contend I’m helping the EAT prevent that miscarriage.

Specific Background — apparently needed given the decision outcomes so far

• Under the UK whistleblowing law that’s most relevant to this case, a “qualifying whistleblowing disclosure” means any disclosure of information which, in the reasonable belief of the worker making the disclosure, tends to show that the environment has been (1), is being (2) or is likely to be damaged (3).

• Note – it can be any one of the three options. And note – the statute does not say the damage needs to be being done directly by the employer (in this case the Respondent — one of the most influential firms on earth when it comes to capital allocation / investment).

• The importance of the progression over time is that investments today made by the Respondent’s clients (including huge global corporations, banks, pensions funds) will create factories and infrastructure that generate greenhouse gas emissions (GHG emissions) over the next 30 to fifty years, indeed for much of this century. That’s about how long factories and infrastructure are used.

• What I realised and the Respondent and tribunal system has so far apparently failed to grasp (or has chosen to ignore or I have not argued clearly enough) is this: to ensure people retiring in 30 years will retire into a livable world, investment flows need to change immediately today. That’s why I blew the whistle.

• Whistleblowing case law requires that the information being disclosed is specific enough (caselaw that includes the Kilraine test.)

• Let me delve a little deeper into this.

In my case I contend my disclosures did provide specific-enough information to Bloomberg LP so that my employer should have known how it could help limit damage to the environment that was already being done and would be done in the future should investment flows continue as they are.

• The tests have both a subjective and an objective element. If the worker subjectively believes that the information he discloses does tend to show one of the listed matters [that is that damage to the environment was being done and would be done] and the statement or disclosure he makes has a sufficient factual content and specificity such that it is capable of tending to show that listed matter, it is likely that his belief will be a reasonable belief’.

This low bar seems to have been incorrectly applied by the lower Tribunal and by the EAT

It’s my Ground 18

The information question is also linked to the questions of my beliefs and the reasonableness of those beliefs. [It’s telling that the four judges in the Tribunal system have spent hardly any time asking me about those beliefs in the hearings and even the full merits hearings I ({mostly} a self litigant) was essentially given only one hour at the end of five days to put my case.]

The question of my beliefs is a subjective question based on the evidence as to what I thought the evidence tended to show and is a question of fact that I submit should have been tested at the full merits hearing to be held the following week.

The context of the whistleblowing is also relevant to the latter question: what it is reasonable to believe will also be an evaluative exercise to be undertaken in the light of all of the facts of the case.

The lower Tribunal and EAT didn’t analyse the context properly, which is an error of law because these facts should have been allowed to be established at the full merits hearing. Only then would the Tribunal be properly able to establish the facts and make its judgment. This is a more full explanation of ground 11 above of this request for review.

• I set out how my disclosures were specific enough below, underpinning arguments already made to the EAT but apparently ignored or not given adequate weight, which is a misapplication of law.

I contend the EAT didn’t apply both the statute itself AND the case law correctly to my circumstances.

It misapplied Fincham v HM Prison Service, which found the whistleblowing does not need to pinpoint the wrongdoing but that it may need to “tend to show” the wrongdoing — in this case that damage to the environment was indeed occurring. This is part of ground Ground 5, as above.

These examples above and below show I meet the required tests in my alleged protected disclosures — that is:

1. I correctly flagged that damage to the environment was occurring and the Respondent was partly responsible and

2. I explained in a specific enough way how the Respondent could and should limit that damage — my suggestions were novel and they even meet Mr Laddie’s proposed three-stage test to determine whether environmental whistleblowing is made in the public interest (even though the meeting of that test is not required by the statute or existing case law).

• They underpin Ground 5 of this request for a review.

• From Mr Laddie:

“How does an ET assess whether or not a disclosure is made in the public interest (or whether it can reasonably be regarded as such)?

Strictly in the context of ERA, s.43B(1)(e) [ie damage to the environment], we (the Respondent) suggest that the following factors may be of assistance:

• STAGE ONE: The extent to which the information has an element of novelty. (The more well-known the information, the less likely it is that its disclosure will be in the public interest.)
  • STAGE TWO: The extent to which the person to whom the disclosure is made is responsible for the damage.
  • STAGE THREE: The extent to which the person to whom the disclosure is made has the power to stop, reduce or reverse the damage.”
  • I {Mathew Carr} would add STAGE FOUR: The extent to which the person {or company} to whom the disclosure is made is benefiting from the environmental damage that’s occurring.

The fact that my whistleblowing also meets Mr Laddie’s three-stage test demonstrates the inadequacy of the analysis undertaken by the lower Tribunal and the EAT. The analysis should have been left to the full merits hearing, anyhow.

{See the example I posit several paragraphs below of how my whistleblowing met the criteria proposed by Bloomberg’s barrister Mr Laddie. I could have applied this test to most of my whistleblowing and it would have met it}

Even though that hearing has taken place, the EAT can now redo its analysis {I said at the time} based on this review request and based on the existing documents. That will inform the lower Tribunal, whose decision is also subject to a review request.

May 2016 – Protected Disclosure 1 [pp316-319 of the EAT bundle]

• For this section I will make comments on my whistleblowing in red to show how it was specific enough, related to environmental protection (limiting environmental damage) and / or in the public interest. Italicised text in black was in my alleged whistleblowing. Emphasis also added.

• I said this: “As the climate crumbles, I was expressly told by [team leader at the time] to write fewer carbon stories, but there was no clear direction about what I should otherwise do.”

• Here I was saying to the Respondent that the climate is crumbling (the environment is being damaged) and that the direction I was being set in (ie to write fewer carbon stories) was the opposite direction to one that might have helped limit damage to the environment (ie MORE carbon stories would have highlighted policy risks faced by investors).

• I said: “A view that power-network stories aren’t in demand is plain wrong.”

• Here I was saying to Bloomberg LP that should we write MORE about power networks and the need to electrify the economy – move it away from fossil fuels – then investors might have had a better chance of limiting damage to the environment. {This is specific whistleblowing}

• Yes, I was assuming some knowledge by my employer — that was reasonable, I contend. The Respondent is a key part of the system doing the damage.

What I said tended to show that the environment has been (1), is being (2) and / or is likely to be damaged (3).

• I said: “Today’s energy story is wrapped up in climate protection, and whichever news company properly covers in a regular, systematic way the damage that each new fossil fuel project will cause … into energy-investment stories etc … will lead the market, because there’s so much intriguing tension in that. The media companies that understand the wastefulness of spending $200 a ton to cut emissions via offshore wind farms now when today that sum will probably cut 10 tons via a coal-to-gas switch … will become rich.

• “Our coverage is too focused on fossil fuels without the important climate context and I believe we should be writing more about climate protection when pretty much all the governments and our clients are asking for carbon pricing…publicly anyway.”

• Here, I was being somewhat technical, but still clearly meeting the above tests.
• The phrase “climate protection” by itself shows I was talking about limiting damage to the environment. Yes I was sweetening my message by talking about how my suggestions might be good for Bloomberg LP (but just because I’m doing that does not cross out the environmental protection / whistleblowing message).

“If a country spends $200 to cut 1 ton of carbon dioxide when the same money could cut 20 tons then that means there is an extra 19 tons of heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere that need not be there.”

• I was pointing out the importance of cost-efficient climate action because every extra ton in the atmosphere is doing damage. I was saying that if Bloomberg LP highlights this urgent need for less wasteful climate policies, then damage to the environment could be limited. This is clearly specific-enough information and my employer could have and should have recognized it as such.

Let me try to spell out even more clearly why the last paragraph is whistleblowing.

• Adding climate context into fossil-fuel stories would probably have meant more hesitation by investors investing in coal, crude oil and natural gas … and an even bigger spend on clean energy. That’s specific enough. Remember, it’s not even whether I was right that counts, it’s that what I was thinking at the time was reasonable. And it was.

• That’s because oil companies were already asking for carbon pricing (and had been for years, at least in public, as I said).

• I was saying that we at Bloomberg LP were ignoring that message and we were therefore indirectly causing the damage. Carbon pricing means polluters would need to pay when putting heat-trapping gas into the atmosphere. Having to pay gives oil companies and utilities an incentive to push for and try cleaner energy systems. That information that more carbon pricing stories were needed was specific enough to allow Bloomberg LP to seek to help limit damage, had it been inclined to do so.

2017 – Protected Disclosure 2 and 3

{Email from me to John Micklethwait, editor in chief at Bloomberg LP}

In your editor’s farewell at the Economist two years ago, you wrote: “Because, in the end, free markets and free minds will win. Liberalism has economic logic and technology on its side.”

The Paris climate deal effectively sets a global carbon budget for the world because of its 2 degree C target. That emissions cap means we effectively already have a global carbon market.

• I was saying the 2c target in the Paris deal effectively set a global emissions cap and the world would need to set policy to achieve it. Indeed, it is doing so, though at a slower pace than is needed.

• Each climate policy has an embedded carbon price within it. eg offshore wind policy in the uk effectively set a co2 price well above $200 a ton of carbon dioxide saved — repeating an idea written back in 2016 when writing about wind-power policy. I agree i could have been more specific in this case, but my disclosures were novel to my leaders — that the Paris climate deal operated like this. If they already knew it, my leaders were pretending they didn’t know it.

Some key questions:

*how free will that market be? how will the right to emit be distributed to nations/ companies?

*how quickly will we overshoot it?

When companies, such as the big miners in Australia, propose new fossil-fuel projects, we at

Bloomberg News should insist reporters consider including the impact of those plans on the global carbon budget.

It’s like putting warning labels on cigarette packets.

Unless we do this, we’ll be open to criticism and reputational risk in the future because the information investors relied on when spending their money omitted the relevant context.

However woolly, this climate agreement now exists. We shouldn’t ignore it.

The context here is that, in my opinion at the time, we in Bloomberg News were largely ignoring the Paris climate deal amid president Donald Trump’s election. His inauguration was two days after I sent this email.

• Importantly, I was not pointing the finger at Bloomberg LP, i was saying we are messing up (including me).

• Bloomberg LP turned me into a threat from a collaborator, I contend, when it talked me into turning my whistleblowing disclosures into a grievance around July/ August 2019.

• Placing warnings into stories about fossil fuel expansion was still somewhat novel at the time, and still is because the respondent is still largely treating fossil fuels as benign products rather than ones that will damage the climate and hurt the lives of future generations. It would limit future damage to the environment.

• By failing to include the warnings, the respondent was contributing to the environmental damage that’s happened since. {This is very specific whistleblowing, as are most of these points, and the EAT should have recognized them as passing the tests}

• It’s relevant to make these disclosures to Bloomberg LP because it is in a position to do something about it (eg place warnings on stories).

• The environmental regulator or even the financial regulator are not necessarily in much of a position to force the Respondent to change the nature of its news to reflect Paris because the press is in theory “free” across much of the world.

• Bloomberg HR and managers at the Respondent were, on the other hand, in that position. In my mind, I thought HR managers would keep the self-interested middle managers in check, but as I found out during this litigation the HR managers really were there mainly to back up the middle managers and protect the fossil-fuel revenue.

That’s why my whistleblowing at the time was directed in the correct direction and the EAT should have recognised this.

This above is Ground 19

It relates to my Stage Four of Mr Laddie’s other three proposed tests for environmental whistleblowing – how much was the Respondent (the receiver of my whistleblowing) benefitting from the environmental damage.

{Note that since Bloomberg fired me in May 2020 it has probably made more than $3 billion in revenue from fossil fuels and related activity.}

It’s true that Bloomberg News’ energy coverage is now structured in a way that reflects the dysfunctional real world energy markets in 2017. We send scores of people to cover OPEC events designed to manipulate the already impure oil market. That’s where the money is, for now.

Meanwhile, we send one or two to cover UN climate talks grappling with complicated global energy-market structure problems from 2020.

• The clear inference that I was making was the Respondent had its resources in the wrong place, still two years after Paris was struck.

• Clearly this is specific information that Bloomberg could have used to help limit damage to the environment by resetting its allocation of resources immediately and improving its news coverage of the UN talks.

• Yet it didn’t make the improvements that much, in my opinion. And it really still hasn’t as of January 2022 {and nor in March 2023 from what I can see as an outsider}.

We need to cover the climate talks more comprehensively to help focus politicians’ and envoys’ minds. When progress isn’t made, we need to better report why. Otherwise, these talks will continue to struggle.

• Indeed, the UN climate talks have continued to struggle and the news coverage of the UNFCCC process remains largely superficial, not just from the Respondent but from most of the mainstream media. Whether there was any real breakthrough at Glasgow in November remains unclear.

• Peter Grauer [Bloomberg chairman] cited Bloomberg New Energy Finance as providing a solution for us when I asked him something like this a couple of weeks ago: “Does our climate and fossil-fuel coverage strike the right balance?”

But BNEF isn’t as enmeshed in real-world markets as we are. Are we giving enough information to terminal subscribers and making them fully aware of the ground shifting beneath them?

I argue we need to look further forward.

• This is key. I was warning Bloomberg (including directly to Chairman Grauer by my question to him) to look beyond the three years forward that most markets focus on …and toward the next thirty years and beyond.

• Yes, I could have been even more specific, but i was sufficiently specific, I contend, to meet the requirements of UK whistleblowing law.

• And, indeed, pension funds are now spending millions of dollars on modelling climate risks faced by their investment portfolios.

So, labelling this 2017 email in 2021 as “non-specific-enough whistleblowing” seems perverse, in my opinion when that process within the world’s pension funds is ongoing.

I’m blowing this whistle because I reckon we’re at risk of missing out on scores of millions of dollars in new revenue. We can extend our lead vs our rivals. That opportunity cost is much more difficult to measure than web hits, of course. Missing out is still messing up. History will show it.

• Yes, it is true I was blowing the whistle not just to limit damage to the environment but to boost Bloomberg’s financial opportunities and boost my own career.

It apparently backfired, bigtime.

• Yet, in whistleblowing case law it does not matter if there are multiple motivations for making a whistleblowing disclosure. The key point in my case is that one of my main motivations was to limit damage to the climate. I should have been protected after making my disclosures.

Here are a few other ideas:

*When we write about countries’ energy-policy strategies, we should better include analysis about the direct carbon prices in those nations, as well as those implied by expensive renewable subsidies and, importantly, the negative carbon prices implied by fossil-fuel subsidies.

• This is very specific information that would limit damage to the environment if the respondent were to include that information on direct and implied carbon prices in its published stories on climate policy, fossil-fuel expansion.

• EG, a fossil-fuel subsidy is effectively a negative carbon price. And there are hundreds of billions of dollars of these subsidies still in the global economy and the G20 is struggling to eliminate them after many years of trying to do so.

• By not including this information, the respondent is partly responsible for the environmental damage because it is a key part of the investment system.

*The International Energy Agency already writes reports on these positive and negative prices

*We should consider assigning/reassigning more people, just a couple, to specifically cover new carbon markets, prices and taxes as they proliferate (and they are eg Canada, Korea) and in case they grow extremely fast after a major climate- related disaster.

• This is very specific information that would have potentially limited damage to the environment.

*China’s starting the biggest carbon market this year.

*We are being beaten on stories and advisory/analysis business by big companies such as RELX, which is setting up a carbon business in China.

• This is very specific information that would limit damage to the environment if more news organisations including the Respondent would focus on the most important regions of future emissions growth and report on the credibility of the solutions being deployed in those regions right now.

*Right now countries are making/debating policy changes and considering global market structure.

See this:

{NSN OGUJGK6K50ZL } [story link {on Bloomberg terminal}] and this {NSN OJQ2E06S972B } [story link]. We shouldn’t wait for others to move first. They will follow us.

• I contend the Respondent didn’t move decisively and, when it did, it excluded my participation in a retaliatory way — in other words I lost this argument that Bloomberg should move early / first / more aggressively on climate news.

Still, remember, I never said Bloomberg was the worst media organisation at climate news. I argued we knew better so we should have done better.

2019

• My email to HR in March 2019 (which covered the previous several months) was sent after I tried to get my managers on board with my pro-climate ideas. It includes many examples of the struggles I was going through and the EAT does not seem to have placed enough weight on the specific information contained in that email, which runs for 15 pages [226-340].

• The EAT had a very limited time to think about these alleged protected disclosures and I contend that had it had more time / took a little more time, it would have come to a different decision. That’s a big part of why this review should be heard and acted on.

• Here’s just part of what I said in my email and why it amounts to whistleblowing. Again, whistleblowing is italicised….

• [327] So I suggest to my leaders we need to do market structure stories because it is the structure of energy markets that will determine how investors make money during the energy transition over time.

I’m a bit shocked that my managers still argue against this…to the extent of suggesting specific limits on the number of these stories in my evaluation last month – one market structure story every six months was one suggestion. It’s even written in my evaluation, appendix 2.

• Here I repeat my dismay at the Respondent’s decision to limit the number of stories about market structure. Market structure stories would have boosted the chance of policy makers around the world deploying better market structure.

• Stories about market structure are important because the climate is only going to be saved by correcting the world’s current market structure, which still favours fossil fuels — even as the world seeks to exit from another global problem arguably caused by the environment – the pandemic.

There’s a recurring theme where my managers say I’m not neutral enough on climate protection stories, while I say I am neutral and they are not neutral enough on status- quo fossil-fuel coverage; can you help provide a framework going forward that helps guide us on this news with less conflict? Maybe the conflict is healthy to a certain extent, but it certainly seems more stressful than necessary.

• This is a crucial piece of my whistleblowing. This gets to the heart of my dispute with the respondent. And something the lower Tribunals and now the EAT has not taken enough time to analyse. I asked for a framework in early 2019 that would have stopped this dispute which has now run for the following three years almost! {as of early last year}

The framework would have limited future damage to the environment, but wasn’t provided.

How I met Mr Laddie’s three stages (and my fourth)

• To relate this {analysis above} to Mr Laddie’s {for Bloomberg} suggested stages on determining whether the disclosures about environmental damage were made in the public interest, thusly:

STAGE ONE: The novelty element was that a redefinition of what was passive neutrality as a reporter and what was activism was needed. The temperature limit in the Paris climate deal meant there was effectively a carbon budget and that the definition of “activism” had changed. Paris effectively turned statements that were backing the status quo into statements of activism (that is, activism in support of climate-damaging fossil fuels); that’s why the new framework was needed

STAGE TWO: By stating that a new framework was needed, I was telling the Respondent that it was (we were) partly responsible for the damage. Investors look to news services like Bloomberg to determine where future profits lie. If Bloomberg’s news ignores the future climate risks, investors making decisions today will too, boosting the levels of future environmental damage

STAGE THREE: By requesting the new framework, I was showing that we as the (or one of the) most influential media organisations, had/have substantial power to stop, reduce or reverse the environmental damage; even if the EAT does not agree with my statement here about the Respondent’s “substantial power” – the statute and case law prevents it from inserting its own view

STAGE FOUR: By accusing my bosses of not being neutral I was saying they were favoring the money from fossil fuels at the expense of environmental damage; this conflict underpins why my whistleblowing was in the public interest and Mr Laddie’s arguments to the contrary given the Chesterton case law he helped create is puzzling in the extreme (see Ground 20 below)

More Key Whistleblowing:

Following on from that, I think we in energy news may benefit from a better structure for dealing with potential/perceived conflicts relating to Mike Bloomberg and Bloomberg Philanthropies spending because there’s some overlap with energy/climate protection stuff; we may have ceded leadership on some climate news coverage to the FT partly because we struggle with this?

{This is really specific whistleblowing that the EAT did not place enough weight on}

I went on in my request:

• Here is another crucial aspect to my whistleblowing. Mike Bloomberg owns about 88% of the Respondent. Yet, he’s also one of the world’s biggest philanthropists.

• Mr Mike Rubens Bloomberg is founder of Bloomberg LP, one of the most powerful companies on earth. He still owns nearly all of it, as his 79th birthday comes up next month.

• Much of the trillions of U.S. dollars of capital being allocated and managed every year around the world is influenced by data structures controlled or influenced by his company. Bonds, equities, property, law and importantly for my case, commodities. He has the ability to influence it all, often from both sides of transactions (I’m not saying he does this).

• Market theory says if a party has influence on both sides of a market, they can be very influential on price, especially if they have more information than market participants generally have.

• To be sure, many of Bloomberg’s systems are designed to communicate information to the whole market. Others are disclosing market data more selectively.

At times in my almost two decades there, influence was actually the stated aim of the newsroom – to be the most influential news organisation on earth.

• Newsroom leaders didn’t stress that as much toward the latter end of my time there.

• Switching away from Bloomberg momentarily, even large corporations might be reluctant to talk about the scale of their influence, because attaining that kind of prominence would confront an associated responsibility for the world’s ills. See Facebook last year also grappling with making money vs doing good, and its own whistleblowers.

As part of this litigation I estimated Bloomberg LP gets about $1 billion of its $10 billion or so revenue each year from fossil fuel-related business. That’s $4 million per working day, if accurate. (Bloomberg LP won’t say. It also doesn’t deny it.) Energy is the world’s biggest industry and amounts to about 10% of the U.S economy.

• Mr Bloomberg is also a special United Nations envoy on climate change — he replaced millions of USA dollars withdrawn by President Donald Trump from the UN climate system.

• Mr Bloomberg’s also head of a global task force on climate-related disclosure and transparency. (He has other roles, too.)

• He’s not only deeply conflicted, but also in some respects not very transparent, which is interesting, considering his climate-transparency role. (This sentence is more like fact than opinion, I contend.)

• His balance of interests might have boosted the chance that UN climate talks in November last year succeeded in their bid to come up with a potentially-biting global carbon-market rulebook to help meet the limited carbon budget.

• They might have been working against a credible outcome.

• I have not been able to tell with confidence in the two months since the end of those talks.

• In 2020, Mr Bloomberg apparently helped finance U.S. President Joe Biden’s win after losing his own bid to become the Democratic nominee.

• How did/does his role in the UN make Brazil, India, Russia, China (the BRIC countries) feel / act in the climate negotiations?

Some officials from emerging and least-developed countries are already deeply suspicious of U.S. motivations and intentions and I know this because they’ve told me. {This is key yet the EAT did not seem to take it into account}

• Mr Bloomberg’s personal worth is about $59 billion, being the 20th richest person in the world, according to Forbes – I think that’s after giving away about $9 billion, according to Wikipedia (I think that’s a low-ball estimate, btw).

• I’m not saying he’s a bad or good bloke. But for me to blow the whistle like I did to HR, even though I knew my managers would probably find out, took some courage.

• I would not have done it unless one of the potential upsides was climate protection. I was willing to speak truth to power (as Mr Laddie mocked me for in the hearings) and the various Tribunal judges and the EAT have not placed enough weight on this alleged whistleblowing.

Misapplication of Chesterton Global case law

• This is a logical stage to expand why my whistleblowing was in the public interest.

Ground 20

• The EAT didn’t apply the Chesterton Global v Nurmohamed 2018 ICR 731 case lawn properly, partly I contend because Mr Laddie for Bloomberg got himself tied in knots trying to argue my whistleblowing didn’t meet the public-interest-test requirements that he helped create in that case when it got to the Court of Appeal in 2017.

• See this whistleblowing guidance in black from a Practical Law UK practice note in black and my comments in red.

• Upholding an employment tribunal’s decision that the disclosure was a qualifying disclosure, the Court gave the following guidance:

Following the logic set out in Babula (see Reasonable belief about wrongdoing), the tribunal has to determine:

–whether the worker subjectively believed at the time that the disclosure was in the public interest; and yes, I did – I sincerely believed we were messing up and the result would be more environmental damage that otherwise could be avoided.

–if so, whether that belief was objectively reasonable.

Because the Respondent is so powerful in capital allocation and I knew it was an important part of the global energy and industry investment system, my belief was also objectively reasonable.

To be sure, others in the firm shared my view. While probably too late to be influential in this litigation, Jahn Olsen, former carbon analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, said on Twitter earlier in January 2022 that Bloomberg was ‘falling further and further behind the pack’ in terms of climate news coverage and there was ‘disinterest in climate and carbon-market coverage’

See Note 1 at the end of this request.

• There might be more than one reasonable view as to whether a particular disclosure was in the public interest, and the tribunal should not substitute its own view.

The EAT should not have concluded my whistleblowing was not in the public interest

This following statement by the EAT (according to page 14 of the Take Note document) goes against the Chesterton case law: “To take an obvious example, an alleged disclosure made to a HR manager is less likely to satisfy the public interest test than a disclosure to a person or body that has powers in relation to environmental issues and some responsibility for acting or some ability to cause whatever concern is being raised to cease.” By citing that “obvious example” I contend the EAT improperly did insert its own view and …

That is my Ground 21

• In assessing the reasonableness of the worker’s belief, the tribunal is not restricted to the reasons that were in the mind of the worker at the time. The worker’s reasons are not of the essence, although the lack of any credible reason might cast doubt on whether the belief was genuine. However, since reasonableness is judged objectively, it is open to a tribunal to find that a worker’s belief was reasonable on grounds which the worker did not have in mind at the time.

The EAT and indeed the Tribunal before it didn’t properly test the reasonableness of my belief, based on working for almost 20 years on climate- related news at the respondent. I’m fully aware I may not have argued it adequately, too.

Still, this is Ground 22

• Belief in the public interest need not be the predominant motive for making the disclosure, or even form part of the worker’s motivation. The statute uses the phrase “in the belief…” which is not same as “motivated by the belief…”.

I made my disclosures both in the belief of the public interest in what I was writing/saying and I was also motivated by the belief. It seems crazy that almost two years into this litigation, I’ve not really been asked about this. Certainly there’s no evidence I wasn’t motivated by the public interest, only that I was motivated by other things as well {I don’t deny I was also thinking showing leadership would be good for my career progression, but I was wrong on this point because the company culture in my wider team was so toxic}.

• There are no “absolute rules” about what it is reasonable to view as being in the public interest. Parliament had chosen not to define what “the public interest” means in the context of a qualifying disclosure, and it must therefore have intended employment tribunals to apply it “as a matter of educated impression”.

The EAT and lower Tribunals should have educated themselves more appropriately about the Respondent’s influence, about climate science and about markets before making their decisions. I’m not ignoring the fact that I as claimant could have done a better job in helping with that education as I made my claim. I argue my initial witness statement and the updated version both went a long way in this regard and have not been given enough weight by the lower tribunal or the EAT. I’m certainly not arguing they are perfect documents.

• I further deal with Mr Laddie’s public-interest-in-whistleblowing rules briefly here as they pertain to the other reasons why I made my whistleblowing disclosures – yes it’s true my reasons were not exclusively related to environmental damage, but that does not matter as discussed more briefly above:
• The numbers in the group whose interests the disclosure served. Tribunals should be cautious about finding the public interest test satisfied purely based on the number of affected employees, because of the “broad intent” of the legislators was that private workplace disputes should not attract whistleblowing protection. In practice, however, the larger the number of persons whose interests are engaged by a breach of their contracts of employment, the more likely it is that there will be other features of the situation which will engage the public interest.

In my case the whistleblowing related to the almost 8 billion people on earth.

• The nature of the interests affected and the extent to which they are affected by the wrongdoing disclosed. Disclosure of wrongdoing directly affecting a very important interest is more likely to be in the public interest than a disclosure of trivial wrongdoing affecting the same number of people, or where the effect of the wrongdoing is marginal or indirect.

Whistleblowing about the lack of climate action meets this part of the test, even though I concede that the Respondent makes up only a part of the system that’s damaging the environment. I never argued that the Respondent was directly doing the damage or was even the party most to blame. I realized that we (“we” when I was employed there) were partly to blame.

I am a true insider and the Respondent’s attempts to label me incapable are merely a distraction technique that the EAT should have seen through

• The nature of the alleged wrongdoing disclosed. Disclosure of deliberate wrongdoing is more likely to be in the public interest than the disclosure of inadvertent wrongdoing affecting the same number of people.

As discussed above, it’s difficult to say absolutely whether the Respondent’s apparent effort to downplay environmental damage and suppress news coverage of solutions was deliberate or inadvertent, yet i contend the above-mentioned fossil fuel revenue was a crucial element in its motivations. Anyhow, it’s not necessary for me to win this argument in order to win my bid to have the EAT review and overturn its ultimate decision to allow the complete strike out my whistleblowing.

• The identity of the alleged wrongdoer. The larger or more prominent the wrongdoer (in terms of the size of its relevant community, that is, its staff, suppliers and clients), the more obviously should a disclosure about its activities engage the public interest, although this principle “should not be taken too far”.

Clearly the respondent is prominent in terms of the size of its staff, suppliers and clients. The 300,000-400,000 clients effectively exert substantial control over the global economy when taken together. They are the richest people and companies in the world — proxy for the top 0.005% richest of the world’s population, if you like.

Having established that my whistleblowing was in the public interest, let’s switch back to continue the analysis of the protected disclosures themselves.

• We are continuing analysis of the email sent to HR in March 2019:

• In this long email I also sent an example of a story that: includes a great quote from a Royal Dutch Shell executive:

“Our level of ambition as an industry, in terms of how clean we are, how low-cost we are, how fast we are, how nimble we are, how open we are — I think we’ll have to reinvent ourselves to be successful in this space,” Shell’s Clare Harris, executive vice president of integrated gas ventures development, told a London conference

—[I was] was told story was close to publishable back when I first filed it months ago…then told to get someone else to say shell’s truth vomit…wasted a lot of time trying but still hope to get somewhere near it

—eds repeatedly threw sand in my face on it, asking for things that were already there (one ed also acknowledged this) constantly changing the goalposts…claiming there were no oil companies in there when there were …claiming there was no information on levelized cost when there was a big fat chart”

This is a key example of how the Respondent should have made a bigger story out of a comment made by an important executive about the need for oil companies to limit environmental damage, but instead it chose to suppress or downplay the message.

• My whistleblowing complaint showed how “we” (me and the Respondent when I was there) were responsible for the bad public discourse on climate action. That is, politicians might have been braver on new climate protection policy had they known at least some oil companies were potentially more willing to change than people thought they were. {This is key specificity}

June / July 2019 Navex Whistleblowing Website Disclosures

• The whistleblowing on page 349 is particularly specific and back up my Ground 5.

• I repeat it here and contend it speaks for itself, especially in the context of the above. Yet I rely on all my words on the other 8 pages, too.

The possible retaliatory behavior I’m experiencing might be related to the fact that I’m pushing my managers to report the climate action story in a better way…and the retaliatory behavior follows my assertion to senior managers that the Financial Times seems to have overtaken us on this front and is doing a better job than us.

How Bloomberg’s climate coverage isn’t as good as it should be: Or, since my bosses are asking me to be “more constructive’’: How Bloomberg’s climate coverage could be improved:

*Improved coverage of the UN climate talks (or is this difficult given Mike Bloomberg’s role in helping to replace US funding for the UNFCCC?). Climate protection will only work if it’s global. It puzzles me that we are not describing the process better for our readers. Every pension fund in the world is grappling with the energy transition and is wanting to know how UN rules and guidelines might shape future national policy for all nations. It’s not reader numbers that are important here. It’s quality of readers. Ie if 100 of our pension fund customers want a story, surely it’s worth doing, even if it only gets 100 hits.

*We need to do more market structure stories because it is the structure of energy markets (and others) that will determine how investors make money/lose money during the climate transition over time. I’m a bit shocked that my managers still argue against this.

*Improved coverage of banking, insurance, pension funds, prudential regs and finance and their role in enabling the climate crisis…and potentially their role in enhancing the energy shift. (Maybe Mike Bloomberg’s role in the on the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures is also making this difficult. If so, why is this not being more openly discussed and addressed within Bloomberg News? ) Senior executive editor John Fraher says he has been looking into expanding the finance team to include climate – he’s been doing this for many months.

*Bloomberg News could appoint point people in each team globally whose role it would be to track and lead on breaking news about how climate change is impacting the industry or market covered by the team. The person could also look out for what policy and technology changes are coming down the track for the industry/market. This would not necessarily require many new bodies.

*I’ve already pushed our oil team to include the climate frame in their stories. While I’ve had some success, the retaliatory behavior seems to continue/get worse. I thought this sort of behaviour from a senior reporter would be rewarded, but it appears to me that it’s punished. This is despite the fact we very consistently get told to “do the right thing.’’

Happy to provide more detail. My mobile phone: +44 [redacted] cheers

• The five bullet points are very specific suggestions and underpin my ground 5.

August 2019 Protected Disclosure 6

• The specific information in this alleged whistleblowing should have been recognised as whistleblowing about damage to the environment that’s occurring and also this should have flagged the alleged whistleblowing detriments.

• The tribunal and EAT might have recognised that I never deliberately applied the PIDA law to help frame my whistleblowing while I was employed at the Respondent.

• Yet still Protected Disclosure 6 easily meets the rules set out above, including these examples — again I rely on everything:

• I said this: “Covering climate is not a crime. It’s doing my job.”

• Clearly I’m flagging here that I’m improperly being steered away from stories on climate action and onto stories boosting natural gas.

• At the bottom of [350] I set out how even though I was the carbon markets guy I was mainly been made to write about fossil fuels. 73% of my stories are fossil fuels in the past four screen of headlines that I assessed. If that’s not specific information, I don’t know what is.

• On page [353] I state that a senior manager Mr Wallace was surprised pension funds are seeking carbon prices.

• They are doing so because carbon prices make it easier to invest without worrying about how carbon prices might hurt those investments. That’s specific information and I should have been protected for whistleblowing about it.

• This is a crucial element of my whistleblowing. Managers needed to know that pension funds who must ensure profits for their investments over 30 years were increasingly worried about the implications of climate chaos (ie damage to the environment) on their investments during the next several decades. That’s the specific information my managers needed to hear. They should have protected me but instead they worked to manage me out, I submit to protect fossil fuel revenue.

Protected Disclosure 7 – Meeting with newsroom leader and other reporters

• The final struck out protected disclosure was made verbally to John Fraher, senior executive editor.

• I said to Mr Fraher at this meeting that the Respondent’s coverage of UN talks was inadequate – that we were not digging into the tension between rich and poor countries adequately to expose potential ways forward on collaborative global climate policy. That was specific-enough information.

• I also asked Mr Fraher about the importance of covering news of the tension between short-term investors such as oil companies and banks — and how their short-term aims might create climate damage (over investment in projects that produce heat-trapping gases) that would damage the environment and hurt the profits available to longer-term-focused pension funds. Those funds can’t afford to be focused only on the short term because they need to provide pensions for retiring workers during the next several decades.

• Mr Fraher didn’t want to engage on this topic.

The EAT and lower tribunals failed to analyse this verbal whistleblowing adequately, which is clearly demonstrated by the short shrift that the EAT attached to it.

{Bloomberg said they would call Mr Fraher as a witness then failed to in the end, denying a chance to properly investigate this protected disclosure}

This above is Ground 23

• I can detect in those two short paragraphs no statements that show the respondent is causing or is likely to cause environmental damage or that it is deliberately concealing environment damage or that it is likely to do so and accordingly the conclusions I have already arrived at apply, the EAT said.

In summary, {despite what the EAT and tribunal decided}, my whistleblowing was specific enough and in the public interest and the EAT should have seen through the Respondent’s arguments to the contrary

Section 3

Further grounds

By cross appealing the way it did, the Respondent created “silos” in the litigation that hived off the protected disclosures and essentially covered up relevant information from the EAT that would have clearly demonstrated the detriments and the link between the whistleblowing and the detriments.

This is Ground 24

Silo creation to successfully mislead the EAT, example

• For instance, as briefly mentioned above, in the middle of 2019, I was placed on {the final} performance improvement program (PIP) immediately after again complaining about Bloomberg LP’s climate coverage on the Navex whistleblowing system.

• Bloomberg managers decided to place me on the so-called PIP on July 12, but didn’t tell me. The Respondent also left this crucial meeting off the agreed chronology written in November for the full merits hearing.
  
  …

• A few days after the decision to place me on the PIP, I contend in order to create more evidence against me, the managers gave me a “sham” warning for insubordination, after I complained because the Financial Times beat us on the story about how the appointment of Ursula von der Leyen as President of the European Commission might boost the European carbon market (Bloomberg News could have won on the story, but was instead focused on managing me out rather than looking after its customers).

• Indeed, the insubordination allegation was particularly crazy and important context that should have been considered by the EAT if it was to make a decision on whether my whistleblowing was whistleblowing.

Here are the details:

As part of my enquires about the politics at the time, I obtained important quotes from Mark Lewis, who was then Head of Sustainability at BNP Paribas. My view was that the story was important and should be published by the end of the day to prevent a competitor breaking it.

• Editors disagreed with my assessment and refused to publish, alleging it wasn’t finished.

• Consequently, the Financial Times published a very similar story a few minutes later – after we’d gone home or around that time.

• The following day, I was subsequently issued with the verbal warning for insubordination after highlighting the loss to managers with an emailed “smile”. My manager initially refused to specify what I’d done wrong, demonstrating the concocted nature of the warning.

Hearing spillover

It’s clear that the bad decisions by the EAT spilled over and helped create a bad decision in the full merits hearing in the following 10 days. {I believe that Bloomberg and the judiciary could have and should have avoided me having to face an EAT and a full-merits hearing in subsequent weeks in December 2021 because I was mostly a self litigant}

That’s my Ground 25

• In 2018 my performance metric counts had surged. That didn’t stop my managers from periodic harrassment (as well as help at times too — I’m not one eyed about this situation) which included harassment via highly sophisticated performance management.

• Despite my performance improvement, by February 2019 I was placed on a type of “headcount” reduction roadmap. The senior newsroom manager who had me on it was meant to be available for cross examination at the full-merits hearing, but Bloomberg decided not to call him in the end, {which I contend is part of the sophisticated multi-year cover up — in publishing this in March 2023 I give Bloomberg the chance to do the right thing}. The Respondent argued the witness became less relevant after the whistleblowing was struck out, demonstrating Ground 25 above.

Dobbie v Felton (t/a Feltons Solicitors) reminded that “public” includes a section of the public and could, in some circumstances, consist of one member of the public and that “public interest” need not be the only motivation for the worker’s allegation of wrongdoing. As long as a genuine belief that making the allegation is in the public interest forms part of the worker’s motivation, the worker may be protected as a whistle-blower.

This above is Ground 26 {related to 21, 22}

I do thank the EAT for its effort under stressful circumstances.

NOTES

1. Olsen Tweet: https://twitter.com/jahn_olsen/status/1479094041564356611?s=20

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So to summarize, there were 16 grounds for requesting review of the main-hearing decision (including 9 cover ups on a preliminary basis), plus 26 grounds for reviewing the earlier EAT decision to strike out all my whistleblowing. That’s a total of 42 ways I was taken out as a whistleblower by Bloomberg and the judiciary. (I’m not saying this is exhaustive.)

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NOTES

London Central Employment Tribunal Decision Dec. 13, 2021 — The Reasons

Take Note version of the transcript that I had (which I knew contained errors) when seeking my request for review published above

Actual transcript provided by the EAT about nine months later

A legal analysis of the document directly above vs the document directly below will yield many examples of how to confuse a self litigant whistleblower, I don’t doubt …and perhaps worse. Someone independent of the process so far should do that work. I will seek to obtain the audio of the EAT hearing and the hearing where the decision was handed down … and the other hearings in the lower tribunals, some of which I’ve already been told are not available ….which is yet another cover up.

Briefing on new whistleblowing law in the UK

Model UK Lawfare Law

See this …and this from January.