[2025] UKUT 00185 (TCC)

The Applicants disagreed with the earnings used by the Authority as the basis for calculating the penalty charged on Mr Arden under Step 2(1)-(3). It was not in dispute that the Authority had included a “sign-on bonus” of £160,000 in Mr Arden’s “relevant earnings”. Mr Jaffey said:

“That payment was made to compensate him for the loss of a bonus payment that his former employer (Sainsbury’s Bank) would otherwise have paid. It was therefore not paid by the Bank as a reward for his services in the relevant period. Instead, it compensated him for services that he had performed in the past for a different employer, which are unrelated to the alleged wrongdoing, and which he forfeited by leaving.”

He went on to say that the £160,000 was therefore not “relevant income”. Mr Stanley disagreed, saying that relevant income is “the gross amount of all benefitsthat a person received from the employment”. As Mr Arden had received the sign-on bonus as part of his remuneration after he joined the Bank in March 2018, there was no basis to exclude it from the definition of “relevant income”.