Pharma boss in sexism storm
pharmafile | November 16, 2015 | News story | |Â Â Â
Immuno Biotech CEO David Noakes has been found guilty of sexual discrimination after making notes on the job application of his former personal assistant.
Lucia Pagliarone, 28, took her 62-year-old former boss to an employment tribunal where she claimed to have witnessed additional sexist incidents at Guernsey-based Immuno Biotech.
Pagliarone said she found her own CV amongst other papers on Noakes’ desk, with an added a note from the executive, saying ‘red lipstick, heels, good, tattoos, do not approve; wearing a dress excellent’.
Noakes is also said to have remarked of another female interviewee ‘we can’t hire her as she is ugly and overweight and I only employ beautiful women’, and in an additional case ‘how are we supposed to hire her; did you see what she was wearing and the size of her? We can’t have her on the frontline representing GcMaf (an unapproved cancer drug produced by the company) looking like that.’
Pagliarone also claimed that Noakes once told her that one of her colleagues, like himself, would only treat good looking people politely, and that the CEO had made several angry outbursts towards mainly female Immuno Biotech employees.
Pagliarone was sacked from her role in January this year after just six months at the firm and only a month after she received a performance-related bonus of £500.
The tribunal panel found Noakes guilty of sex discrimination and ordered him to pay £10,500 to Miss Pagliarone, calling his remarks inappropriate and constituting an ‘intimidating, hostile and humiliating working environment’.
It is not the first controversy Immuno has been caught up in this year, the sexism row following February’s raid on one of the company’s laboratories in Cambridge, where government agents seized 100,000 vials of the unapproved GcMaf cancer drug manufactured by Immuno, which had been deemed unfit for human use, as it was said to contain harmful materials.
At the time, Immuno called accused the Medicine and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) behind the ban of “complete ignorance”.
Joel Levy
