Chopper Charity Chastised
An exclusiver report by James Garrett. When an experienced Somerset executive with a background in the helicopter industry moved west, it seemed like a great opportunity lay before him.....
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Firstly an apology. Ordinarily we would have posted this story on Monday. However as you’ll see it is a complex and legalistic story and there were a couple of good reasons which meant we could not publish until today. We hope you thimk James’s exclusive was worth waiting for!
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Chopper Charity Chastised
A Somerset helicopter engineer who lost out to a competitor who submitted an inaccurate CV, when they both applied to run the UK's oldest air ambulance charity, has finally been vindicated at the Employment Tribunal.
The tribunal, to which Steve Murdoch first complained two and a half years ago, in a case which he says has to date cost him around £100,000 in legal fees, ruled that he was constructively unfairly dismissed by Cornwall Air Ambulance Trust (CAAT).
The tribunal will reconvene next month to decide what compensation he should receive.
Mr Murdoch’s flight path into CAAT began some 30 years ago in Somerset, the UK's home of helicopters. Living in Huish Episcopi, he spent ten years in Yeovil with Aerosytems, then owned jointly by GKN and BAE Systems, working on Merlin and Apache helicopters.
He subsequently joined Thales in Wells to work on military communications systems before setting up his own consultancy business, based in Somerton.
A later project involved him working with the Dorset & Somerset Air Ambulance service, setting up the contract for the acquisition and operation of its current helicopter. That got him a job at Newquay airport, where CAAT is based, to work as a management consultant and, later, chief operating officer (COO) at its Cornish equivalent.
All in all he spent over 10 years at CAAT, a favourite charity of the Queen, its royal patron since 2011.
In early-2021 Mr Murdoch was standing in as chief executive at CAAT when he applied for the top job on a permanent basis. He quit after discovering that the CV of the applicant who was given the job contained significant inaccuracies - and blowing the whistle to trustees.