Ashish Bhatia

Findings — machine-extracted (anthropic-batch:claude-opus-4-8); verify against the decision

Mr Bhatia, a director at Bhatia Best Limited, faced two allegations following an Employment Tribunal finding that his firm had discriminated against an employee, Miss Brown, on grounds of pregnancy and maternity. The Tribunal found Allegation 1.1 (discrimination) NOT PROVED: while it found Miss Brown had been treated unfavourably at the 8 August 2017 meeting and dismissed on 9 August 2017, it was not satisfied this was because of her pregnancy/maternity - the unfavourable treatment was for performance/reliability reasons. The Tribunal did not accept Mr Bhatia genuinely believed she committed benefit fraud, finding he used it as a pretext, but neither was it satisfied the dismissal was due to pregnancy. Allegation 1.2 (failure to report the Employment Tribunal Judgment to the SRA) was PROVED, the Tribunal finding Mr Bhatia knew he ought to have reported the matter and failed to do so, rejecting his claim that the settlement's waiver of liability expunged the obligation. No express finding of dishonesty was made. He was reprimanded and ordered to pay £1,000 costs (reduced by 95% under Broomhead principles since the bulk of the case concerned the unproved allegation).

Duties found breached:

• Handle inadvertently received material
• No baseless or threatened misconduct report

Mitigating factors:

• Failure to report was a single episode in a previously unblemished career
• Positive character references
• No harm caused as SRA discovered matter via newspaper article
• Low likelihood of repetition