‘Boss hired Russian hitman to kill me’

A LONDON executive who is suing her boss for £4 million (€2.42m) for discrimination, believes he hired a hit man to kill her, a tribunal heard yesterday.

A hearing in central London heard that Jordan Wimmer called the police after being followed by a man on the Kings Road on May 9 this year.

Ms Wimmer accuses her boss Mark Lowe, who runs Namos Capital, of humiliating her when they worked together.

Notes of a conversation she had with a doctor showed that Ms Wimmer claimed that a man who looked like Mr Lowe drove a car at her.

Elizabeth Melville, representing Mr Lowe, read part of a doctor’s note which said “her boss had always said he knew lots of Russians and could get rid of people in a heartbeat”.

Ms Melville said: “Is it your belief Mr Lowe was trying to get a hitman or member of his family to kill you?”

Ms Wimmer replied: “Yes.” Asked if she thought her claims were the product of “an overactive imagination”, Ms Wimmer said: “No, I don’t. If you knew your client you would understand.”

Ms Wimmer told the hearing she was still afraid of Mr Lowe: “Yes, I sleep with chairs on my door every night, and yes, when I have a car that’s coming at me six times, swerving at me, and I have to run into a restaurant and dial 999, with a man identical to Mr Lowe sitting in the front seat, yes, I think my life is in danger.”

Ms Wimmer’s witness statement said between January and March 2008 she had showed symptoms of depression and was suffering from exhaustion due to overwork and harassment.

Mr Lowe’s barrister read a section from Ms Wimmer’s email diary from January 2008 which showed she had a holiday in the Caribbean and Canada, had been out for drinks with friends on several nights, and had held a birthday party.

It also showed that in the space of a week she had gone to a party at Annabel’s nightclub in London, been to a West End musical and then flown to New York for a weekend where she attended a ball at the invitation of an Austrian bank.

Ms Melville said: “This diary Miss Wimmer is not the diary of a woman who is being overworked, is it?”

Another section of the diary from April showed in a three-day period she went to a private members’ club, then planned a trip to a West End nightclub before going out for dinner and on to Annabel’s the next night.

Ms Wimmer said she only went to the private members’ club because she was able to get a quiet table there. She said: “I was so noise sensitive then. I had so much anxiety then.”

Ms Wimmer told the hearing her social activities were a front she hid behind to mask her anxiety.

Ms Melville told the hearing that Ms Wimmer was “prone to exaggeration and fantasy” and had actually turned down an offer of help at work.

The hearing heard Ms Wimmer received a phone call and an email in May last year from a Russian woman named as Margarita, looking for work, but she decided not to take up the offer.

Ms Wimmer said that decision was based on her assumption that the woman was a Russian prostitute and Mr Lowe only wanted her to join the company so he could sleep with her.

Ms Melville said: “You propose to come to this tribunal, an open hearing, and allege this woman you never met is an escort?”

Ms Wimmer replied: “I could be completely wrong. I’ve never met her, it’s just the way my boss was. I had a reasonable expectation what she was when I heard her spoken English.”

On Tuesday the hearing heard Ms Wimmer accuse Mr Lowe of bringing high-class escort girls to business meetings.

Ms Melville said: “You have absolutely no evidence, do you, on which to base your statements, not inferences, but statements that these women were escorts?”

Ms Wimmer, 29, replied: “My proof is what I saw, what I heard and what the escorts said to me.”

The Central London Employment Tribunal heard Ms Wimmer, a Canadian who lives in Chelsea, joined Mr Lowe’s firm in 2004 and was originally paid £50,000 a year but that over four years her salary rose to £577,000.

Asked by Ms Melville about her 1,000% increase in income, she said: “I think I had a phenomenal increase in workload in four years.”

Ms Wimmer, who is claiming for sex discrimination, unlawful deduction of wages, unfair constructive dismissal and disability discrimination, said she had to shoulder an “ever-increasing burden” of the work.

She said Mr Lowe regarded blonde women as “inferior” and boasted to her about his love of Asian women. Ms Wimmer said she felt demeaned when Mr Lowe brought an “unsavoury person” to a business event at the Hong Kong Yacht Club.

The woman, named only as Ling, was in fact a Malaysian banker and Mr Lowe’s girlfriend.

Ms Wimmer said: “Whatever’s going on in his personal life is fine but to bring her into the business arena and associate her with me is degrading because that is something that would rub off on me.

“It’s so degrading for me to have to stand in a pinstripe suit next to somebody in Dior hotpants that don’t cover her buttocks when she is standing there in stilettos with her breasts pushed out.

“I don’t think that’s what you do in one of the elite places in Hong Kong.”

The hearing continues next week.