CAMDEN Council has been ordered to pay more than £100,000 to a former employee who was wrongly sacked following a “seriously flawed” internal investigation.

Employment tribunal judge Kimbra Welch’s judgment, handed down earlier this month, orders the lump sum to be paid to Jimmy Thornhill for loss of earnings since he was dismissed for gross misconduct in September 2017.

The “remedy” decision also includes details of significant pension payments to be made to the 60-year-old street lighting and drainage manager.

There are also heavy legal fees that take the cost to the taxpayer way above the £100,000 payout. The council issued a grovelling apology stating “we got it wrong” and claiming it had already carried out a review and made changes to its “processes and systems”, although a spokesman would not clarify what these were.

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Dennis McNulty, the Camden GMB rep who helped Mr Thornhill, said: “It’s an institutional abuse of public taxpayers’ money that has been used to defend ill-advised legal opinions.”

Mr Thornhill told the employment tribunal, at Victory House last year, he had been “thrown under a bus” by bosses looking for a scapegoat over a bungled tender.

The council had agreed a £2.4m legal settlement with FM Conway after the company made a legal challenge over a public realm, maintenance and improvement works contract offer won by Volker Highways.

An internal investigation found that Mr Thornhill, who had worked at the council for 37 years, had been mistakenly emailed a Volker Highways “price-list” by a senior manager – financial information he was not supposed to see.

The specifications of the contract were later adjusted by Mr Thornhill in a change FM Conway argued had “enabled Volker to win the contract”, the council’s lawyer Suraj Sudra told the  employment tribunal last year.

He was sacked in the witchhunt following the legal settlement but the handling of the disciplinary process, overseen by former chief executive Mike Cooke, was “seriously flawed”, according to Judge Welch. Her judgment said: “There is no evidence the claimant would have been dismissed if a fair procedure had been followed.”

A Camden Council statement said: “While we have always prided ourselves on our practices and procedures we, of course, accept that in this case we got it wrong.”