An ex-BNP Paribas SA equities lawyer was fired for using a racial slur to describe a colleague, likening another to Cambodian dictator Pol Pot and calling his boss a vulgar name.
Benoit Faure is now suing the bank for €1.5 million ($1.6 million) in compensation and bonuses, claiming the bank violated his privacy. He argues that the offensive language, while inappropriate, was contained in emails to a couple of teammates and was never said directly to the people concerned.
“You can argue about morality, but it’s a strictly private matter,” Faure’s attorney, Paul Van Deth, told a panel of four judges at the Paris employment tribunal on Friday. “It can’t be a reason for dismissal.”
BNP’s attorney Sophie Brezin countered by saying that the messages were not as private as Faure claimed, and that their content belied the image he presented during his three decade career.
“The facade is polished, but underneath it’s dreadful,” Brezin said.
In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and the #MeToo movement, courts have faced an increase in race and sex discrimination cases, with large corporations subjected to higher public scrutiny.
The Faure case first made headlines in a January 2022 article in the UK’s Telegraph newspaper about a London-based teammate who had kept his job even after an investigation found that he mocked a colleague with an Asian stereotype.
The article didn’t name Faure but listed the racial slur he made in an email, triggering another internal investigation and ultimately his dismissal later that year. At the time, Faure was global head of the legal team in charge of debt and equity capital markets.
BNP Paribas declined to comment on the ongoing case. The bank added that it “rejects any form of discrimination and expects from all its employees to display professional behaviors under any circumstances.”
Overworked
Van Deth suggested on Friday that the Telegraph article came at a convenient time for the bank, which was at odds with Faure after he claimed to be overworked as capital markets boomed.
There is “no other argument than these nine emails out of the hundreds of thousands sent over the past 33 years,” Van Deth said. The attorney insisted that nearly all those who testified anonymously during BNP’s internal investigation of the facts were positive about Faure, describing him as “a great colleague, a great boss.” Only one, according to Van Deth, was negative: Faure’s own boss.
Brezin argued that Faure’s seniority at the bank and his trade could be considered “as an aggravating factor,” rather than the opposite.
“He’s a lawyer, he knows the weight of his words,” she said. “Yet, I don’t have any record of Mr. Faure saying ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings.’ I don’t have any of that on file.”
In an email sent after the hearing, Faure said he “of course expressed regrets when he was summoned for the dismissal interview” by BNP.
He said that Pol Pot was a nickname for a top manager who was known to have been tasked with achieving a 15% reduction in staff costs in the investment bank’s legal division.
“I didn’t invent this nickname, nor the others, which were commonly used by everyone, but the bank didn’t see fit to go after the others who used these words, names as much as I did,” Faure wrote in a message to Bloomberg.
The former BNP veteran is set to get a ruling on June 26.