A financier who is suing the boss of a Mayfair investment firm for sexual harassment believed that he had hired a Russian hitman to kill her, a tribunal was told yesterday.
Jordan Wimmer, 29, has already accused Mark Lowe, the head of Nomos Capital, of bringing escort girls to meetings and discussing with her his sexual fantasies. At a hearing in Central London yesterday she told the court that she was convinced the millionaire wanted her dead.
The employment tribunal was told that Ms Wimmer called the police after being followed by a man in Kings Road, Chelsea, on May 9.
Notes of a conversation she had with a doctor showed she claimed that a man who looked like Mr Lowe drove a car at her. Elizabeth Melville, representing Mr Lowe, read part of the doctor’s note which said “her boss had said he knew lots of Russians and could get rid of people in a heartbeat”.
The lawyer asked Ms Wimmer: “Is it your belief Mr Lowe was trying to get a hitman or member of his family to kill you?” Ms Wimmer replied: “Yes.” Asked if she thought her claims were the product of “an overactive imagination”, Ms Wimmer said: “No, I don’t. If you knew your client you would understand.”
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She was still afraid of Mr Lowe, she said. “I sleep with chairs on my door, and when I have a car that’s coming at me six times, and I have to run into a restaurant and dial 999, with a man identical to Mr Lowe sitting in the front seat, yes, I think my life is in danger.”
Mr Lowe denies all the allegations.
Ms Wimmer is claiming damages of £4 million from Mr Lowe, 59, after resigning from her job this year. She later suffered a breakdown and has had to undergo psychiatric treatment.
Ms Wimmer, a Canadian who now lives in Chelsea, joined the firm in 2004 and was originally paid £50,000 a year, but that increased to £577,000 within four years.
In her witness statement Miss Wimmer had said that between January and March last year she had showed symptoms of depression and was suffering from exhaustion brought on by overwork and harassment. Her “begging” for help was ignored. She had been “drowning in work” amid “astronomical hours”.
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Mr Lowe’s barrister suggested that, far from being overworked, Ms Wimmer was enjoying a “jet-set lifestyle”. The court was read a section from Ms Wimmer’s e-mail diary from January last year that showed she took holidays in the Caribbean and Canada, had been out for drinks with friends on several nights and had held a birthday party.
It also showed that in the space of a week she had gone to a party at Annabel’s nightclub in London, to a West End musical and to New York for a weekend, when she attended a ball at the invitation of an Austrian bank.
Ms Melville said: “This diary, Ms Wimmer, is not the diary of a woman who is being overworked, is it?” Ms Wimmer said that she only went to a particular private members’ club because she was able to get a quiet table there. She said: “I was so noise-sensitive then. I had so much anxiety.”
Ms Wimmer told the hearing that her social activities were a front to mask her anxiety. “My public face was not reflecting my private self and my private self was one that was suffering and very unwell.” She added that sometimes she was so depressed and exhausted that she felt unable to leave her bed, to which Ms Melville replied: “I think most people suffer from that.”
Ms Wimmer is claiming for sex discrimination, unlawful deduction of wages, unfair constructive dismissal and disability discrimination.
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The hearing continues.