A phone shop worker who was made redundant three days after telling company bosses that his manager was claiming bonuses by marking down sales of phone cases as repair jobs has won nearly €11,000.

Denes Jorge secured the award on foot of a complaint under the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977 against his former employer, Anjnj Limited, trading as IT Star.

Jorge worked between August 18th 2024 and September 5th 2025 as a sales assistant on the minimum wage at the company’s shop in Dún Laoghaire, one of a chain of six, the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) was told.

In his complaint form, Jorge wrote that around a month before his dismissal, the then store manager hired a new employee and stopped turning up at his scheduled shift start time of 10am.

Jorge stated that he was “left to open and run the store every morning”, with the manager only arriving at 12.30pm or 1pm.

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The workload and responsibilities were “excessive” and “far beyond the role of sales assistant”, he wrote in his complaint

“In practice, I was working more than the manager himself,” he wrote.

He complained to company director Arthur Muzzi about the situation on WhatsApp on August 25th 2025 and also flagged what he considered to be an “irregular practice” by the then store manager.

The store manager, he wrote, “was selling phone cases but registering these sales in the system as ‘repairs’, thereby claiming the maintenance bonus for himself”.

“I believed this practice to be improper and potentially unlawful, and I felt it was my duty to report it,” Jorge wrote.

Three days later, he was given a letter dismissing him from his employment on the stated basis of redundancy with a week’s notice, the tribunal noted.

In the termination letter of August 28th 2025, the company cited an “ongoing financial crisis” and said it needed to restructure the business and reduce labour costs.

It was the company’s position that Jorge’s line manager had a discussion with him concerning the future of the shop in August 2025, which Jorge denied.

The company, which was represented by company director Arthur Martins at a WRC hearing in July this year, denied “any unfairness” in the dismissal and any link to Jorge complaining about his line manager.

Adjudication officer Penelope McGrath upheld Jorge’s complaint in a decision published on Monday, and awarded him €10,800 for 20 weeks’ loss of earnings.

She wrote that Jorge’s warning to the company director over WhatsApp “had the hallmark of a protected disclosure”. The complainant “was taking a significant personal risk in making allegations against his immediate manager”.

“In any properly managed organisation, such concerns would ordinarily trigger an appropriate investigation,” she wrote.

McGrath accepted the company “may have been experiencing trading difficulties”.

However, she found that without a meaningful consultation process, advance notice, or any consideration of alternatives to dismissal, the company fell “considerably short” of the standard required of a fair redundancy.