A pregnant Swansea sales manager offered to pitch to a client. Her boss’s answer, a tribunal has found: “Nobody wants to see a pregnant woman, Jess.”
Jessica Morgan proved the comment was made. She proved it was discrimination. And she still lost that claim, because she brought it too late.
What won her case instead was a company car, and the moment her old firm tried to use it as a “bargaining chip” against money she was owed.
Morgan took on Panelex Wood Agency, a timber supplier in Fforestfach, at an employment tribunal in Swansea in May. The written judgment landed in June, and made national headlines this week.
She had joined the firm in April 2020, a £40,000-a-year sales manager working hand in glove with Frederick Geraint Hawkes, the former Neath rugby club director who ran procurement. She answered to him, and the tribunal found the power between them tilted further than any normal boss and employee.
Then, in July 2023, she told him she was pregnant.
Morgan sensed she had become “an inconvenience”, though the tribunal put that impression down largely to her own anxiety about her job.
What came next it did not put down to anxiety.
‘I was upset!!’
That November, weeks before maternity leave, Morgan offered to help prepare a client presentation. Back came the reply about nobody wanting to see a pregnant woman.
Hawkes denied ever saying it. The tribunal decided he had.
Her messages from the time told their own story. “I’d walk out and start today if it was affordable!” she wrote to a friend. “Not allowed to visit customers anymore ‘no one wants to see a pregnant woman’ was what he said to me last week… I was upset!!”
She never challenged him to his face. Employment Judge Alys Williams said that proved nothing against her, given “the dependency, anxiety and desire to please” that ran through the relationship, and the “futility of arguing with Mr Hawkes”.
The comment, the judge ruled, “suggests that the way a pregnant woman looks will make her off-putting to clients to the extent that she should not be seen”.
Morgan also claimed Hawkes told her he “wouldn’t be making the mistake of hiring a woman again”. He denied that one too, and there the denial stood.
Then the sting: a claim proved on the facts, thrown out on the clock. Brought significantly out of time, the tribunal had no power to rule on it.
The car that lost them the case
Maternity leave began in January 2024, with Hawkes telling her to “focus on being a mum”.
By October, at a Costa Coffee meeting about her return, Morgan was told her job no longer existed and the firm “did not know where to put her”. Hawkes had a suggestion: “Surely he [her partner] earns enough for you to stay at home.”
She left with a deal. Her employment would end, she would keep the company car until Christmas, and she would be paid what she was owed.
Within weeks the firm demanded the car back. The trigger, the tribunal found, was Morgan asking for her money.
“The car was used as a bargaining chip for [Ms Morgan] to receive that money which she had made clear from the outset she desperately needed,” the judge said. The firm had “reneged” on the deal. That was victimisation, and that claim she won.
Her claims of unfair dismissal, wrongful dismissal and sex discrimination all failed, and remarks about her being forgetful were found to have nothing to do with her pregnancy.
“In many ways therefore this is a sad case,” the judge said, “and it is unfortunate that the relationship has broken down to such a degree.”
A £26m collapse and a decade-long ban
The Hawkes name has been through the courts before.
He and his mother Janis ran F G Hawkes (Western) Ltd, a plywood importer trading as RKL Plywood from Kings Dock, until it crashed into administration in 2011 owing an estimated £26.7m, with Swansea Council left to write off more than £440,000 in unpaid business rates.
In 2015 a High Court judge found the pair had signed accounts they knew were misleading and filed false VAT returns hiding more than £1.5m, and banned them both from running companies for ten years. Hawkes denied wrongdoing; the judge called his evidence on the VAT returns “wholly incredible”.
And while the taxman was being kept in the dark, the judge found, money was still flowing to Hawkes’s sporting interests: the firm covered more than £330,000 of Neath Rugby’s wage bill in its final months and sent £98,000 to Neath Football Club, payments the judge said “aggravate the already serious nature of their conduct”.
How much the victimisation claim will cost Panelex will be decided at a further hearing.
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