Displaying items by tag: Criminal Probe

1st April 2022

Criminal Probe P&O Ferries Face Over Sackings

Operator P&O Ferries faces criminal investigation over sackings.

Operator P&O Ferries faces a probe, reports BBC News, into the controversial no-notice sackings of nearly 800 members of staff.

The Insolvency Service has launched criminal and civil investigations into the circumstances around the redundancies.

In a letter, it said it would consider "prompt and appropriate action" if the law was broken.

Grant Shapps has also asked the service to consider disqualifying its boss from acting as a company director.

The transport secretary made the announcement as part of new pay plans for the ferry industry this week after P&O Ferries sacked 786 employees without notice and replaced with them with agency workers.

P&O Ferries said on Friday that all but one of the sacked employees had taken steps to accept the redundancy offer made by the company. One former P&O worker, John Lansdown, told the BBC he did not respond to the company's offer.

The company declined to comment on the Insolvency Service's investigation when approached by BBC News.

Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng tweeted that he and Mr Shapps would follow the new investigations into P&O Ferries closely as they develop.

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New York Yacht Club’s biennial Invitational Cup

Ireland has a proud history in New York Yacht Club’s biennial Invitational Cup, with Irish participation from the very start and a podium result in 2019.

In 2009, two Irish Clubs, Royal St. George in Dun Laoghaire and Royal Cork in Crosshaven, entered into New York's newest sailing competition that was reminiscent of Newport’s America’s Cup days when 19 yacht club teams from 14 nations descended on this “City by the Sea”.

The Rolex New York Yacht Club Invitational Cup is a competition between yacht clubs, with strict eligibility rules ensuring that each team is comprised exclusively of amateur sailors.

The competition, which was first run in 2009, has drawn entries from 49 clubs from 22 nations on all six inhabited continents.

The New York Yacht Club won the inaugural event in 2009, with the Royal Canadian Yacht Club winning in 2011 and 2013, England's Royal Thames Yacht Club winning in 2015 and Southern Yacht Club from New Orleans winning in 2017.

In 2019 the regatta was sailed for the first time in the New York Yacht Club’s fleet of IC37 yachts, and Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron, from Australia, became the first Southern Hemisphere club to win the trophy. And it was in this edition that Anthony O’Leary’s Royal Cork team took the bronze medal.