Salesman sacked from €200,000-a-year job after trying to block ‘corrupt’ deal loses case

DCM Editorial Summary: This story has been independently rewritten and summarised for DCM readers to highlight key developments relevant to the region. Original reporting by Irish Times, click this post to read the original article.

A software salesman who wound up doing fast food deliveries after being sacked from his €200,000-a-year job has failed to convince a tribunal he was retaliated against for speaking up about alleged corruption in the firm.

Ali Izzy was sacked following a complaint of “insubordination” by his former line manager in 2024 after revoking a €500,000 discount on software being supplied via a middleman to the government of Saudi Arabia in June that year.

His complaints under the Protected Disclosures Act 2014 and the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977 against Solarwinds Software Europe DAC in Cork city were dismissed by the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) in a decision published on Tuesday.

SolarWinds, a provider of network monitoring technology, had denied the alleged employment rights breaches.

Last year, Izzy told a hearing that SolarWinds’ former regional sales director for the Middle East, Abdul Rehman, approved a “crazy” €500,000 discount on foot of an alleged “side deal” with a third-party distributor in Saudi Arabia that the complainant alleged had a “history of corruption”.

The WRC made no ruling on the veracity of Izzy’s corruption claims, but found he held a reasonable belief when he reported his concerns to his employer. However, an adjudicator concluded Izzy misconducted himself when he intervened personally in a bid to block the deal, and the firm was entitled to sack him.

Izzy said one of SolarWinds’ wholesale distributors in Saudi Arabia was “financially struggling” in 2023 and that its account was “on hold” from March to November that year.

Izzy said he believed Rehman “leaked” the prices he had set on the package to the distributor, and that his boss had a “side deal” with the distributor, which he claimed had “a history of corruption and bribery”.

His evidence was that the same firm had attempted to bribe him with a sum of €10,000 in the first quarter of 2021 – and that the overture was made on behalf of the distributor by a different former SolarWinds employee, who left the company a number of years ago.

He said he raised the alleged bribe attempt for the first time with Rehman in October 2023 when his boss visited the Cork offices. He went to the company’s legal department about it the following month, he said.

Rehman, who said he had moved on from employment with SolarWinds, acknowledged Izzy told him about the bribe attempt, but said it was “nothing to do with me”.

Izzy described the discount as “crazy” and said that it was based on “misleading information”. The company’s position was that the discount had been approved by managers at a higher level than Rehman.

In his decision, published on Tuesday, O’Riordan found that Izzy held a reasonable belief about wrongdoing, and that issues he had raised did constitute protected disclosures.

At no point had the firm’s lawyers suggested to Izzy his claims were “fabricated or wholly speculative” during cross-examination, the adjudicator wrote.

However, he was not convinced whistleblowing was an “operative factor” in Izzy’s sacking.

“While I am satisfied that the complainant acted out of conscientious and well-intentioned motives, those motives did not afford him licence to withdraw a sanctioned deal in a precarious manner,” O’Riordan wrote.

By engaging in “deliberate obstruction of a critical end-of-quarter sales process”, Izzy jeopardised the deal and required his colleagues to “redo work over the weekend”.

It could be classed as “misconduct capable of constituting substantial grounds for dismissal,” he wrote. Izzy would have kept his job if he had not blocked the deal, he added.

He dismissed Izzy’s complaints under the Protected Disclosures Act 2014 and the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977.