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. The first, that he discriminated against employee Miss Brown due to her pregnancy/maternity in an 8 August 2017 meeting and her 9 August 2017 dismissal, was found NOT PROVED - the Tribunal accepted she was treated unfavourably but concluded the reason was performance/reliability issues rather than pregnancy. Notably, the Tribunal did not accept Mr Bhatia had a genuine belief that Miss Brown committed benefit fraud, finding he used it as a pretext to dismiss her, but was still not satisfied the dismissal was because of pregnancy. The second allegation, failure to report the Employment Tribunal's adverse discrimination judgment to the SRA (breaching Principle 7 and Outcome 10.3), was PROVED, as management committee minutes showed Mr Bhatia knew he should report but did not. No express finding of dishonesty was made. He was reprimanded and ordered to pay £1,000 costs (reduced by 95% under Broomhead principles as the main unproven allegation comprised the bulk of the case).

Duties found breached:

• Disclose adverse law to the court
• Act in the client's best interests

Mitigating factors:

• Single episode in a previously unblemished career
• Positive character references
• No harm caused as SRA discovered matter anyway
• Low likelihood of repeat