Accountant ordered to pay £80k for 'grossly offensive' email about ex-boss's wife

An accountant has been ordered to pay nearly £80,000 after sending an email calling his former boss’s wife a “stupid lying c***”.

Edward Franklin’s abusive messages brought his profession into disrepute, the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales ruled.

The accountant must pay £73,600 in costs, as well as a £5,000 penalty for the “childish, petulant, unprofessional and rude” remarks.

Mr Franklin worked for a company, anonymised in the institute’s recent ruling as H, until his employment was terminated in April 2022.

H had to cease trading two months beforehand as it no longer met compliance rules, and the circumstances around that, and around Mr Franklin losing his job, led to a “significant and acrimonious” dispute between Mr Franklin, his former boss, and his former boss’s ex-business partner.

Around the time that H ceased trading, Mr Franklin had set up his own accountancy firm, and many of H’s clients were transferred over to the new company.

In June 2022, one of those clients accidentally sent their payment to H rather than to Mr Franklin's company.

It was during the argument that followed over the payment that Mr Franklin sent the “highly inappropriate and offensive” messages.

Across a host of emails to a number of people, he called his former boss “a slippery dishonest c***”, as well as “stupid” and “pathetic”.

He also sent an email to his former boss, dated 14 August 2022, which read: “I know what a loser you are ... you are like some loser twenty something at the back of the Formula 4 grid.”

The following month, he emailed his former boss again and copied in two other people.

“You are a lying c***. And your wife is a stupid lying c***,” he wrote.

He also alleged that his former boss’s wife only got to where she is because she slept with her now-husband when she was a trainee, as “she clearly wasn’t going to make it as [a] lawyer”.

The email further goaded his former boss to “go ahead, make your little complaint” to the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales.

Mr Franklin later described the email as the “worst thing [he] had ever written” and as “completely unacceptable, offensive, hurtful and vindictive”.

The tribunal said that his “unprovoked attack” on his former boss’s wife was “unprofessional, unacceptable and likely to bring the profession into disrepute”.

His conduct “fell significantly short of required standards of professionalism”, it said.

The tribunal found that Mr Franklin's emails amounted to “obscene and grossly offensive language”, for which he was ordered to pay the starting fine of £5,000.

The costs order of £73,600 took the total he must pay to £78,600.