BNP Manager Alleged to Have Cut Women’s Bonuses to Give to Men

A BNP Paribas SA manager faces allegations he ordered staff to cut female employees bonuses to boost the pay of male colleagues in London, according to fresh claims by a broker who previously won a landmark case against the French bank.

Stacey Macken, a prime brokerage product manager, won a historic £2 million ($2.6 million) equal pay case in 2019 after she proved she was paid significantly less than her male colleagues and targeted by sexist behavior — including finding a witch’s hat left on her desk.

Now Macken is suing the bank for a second time, claiming that unnamed female employees saw evidence of further allegations of discrimination at the lender’s London office.

Macken alleges that Frederic Zorzi, now global head of primary markets, told managers to cut 60% off the 2019 bonuses of women in his group and distribute them equally among male bosses, according to documents prepared for an employment tribunal last week.

BNP said it fully investigated the allegations when they were first raised. “No wrongdoing was found and therefore no disciplinary process was followed,” the bank said in a statement.

Zorzi didn’t respond to individual requests for comment sent to him via the bank.

Macken remains a thorn in the side of the French lender after becoming the first person to force a large financial institution to undergo a equal pay audit that was published last year. The new claim cites two unnamed female employees as the sources of her information. She didn’t witness the Zorzi episode laid out in the current lawsuit.

“This isn’t somebody who went out and celebrated because she won,” Macken’s lawyer said at the tribunal. “She’s had to continue to battle.”

Macken said that despite blowing the whistle on these claims, BNP has unnecessarily dragged the process out over many years with “sham investigations.”

One whistleblower, an ex-employee of BNP, said she saw emails from early 2019 where Zorzi gave the discriminatory instructions to male heads of teams, according to her witness statement. She said that another female employee confronted Zorzi only for him to put her performance mark back up. She said she separately raised an internal whistleblowing complaint and told the bank’s regulators.

BNP said that these the emails were never found.

“We fully investigated all of these allegations when originally raised, a process then reviewed by an independent investigation more recently when they were incorporated into the current complaint,” BNP said.

On Thursday, lawyers for BNP’s asked the tribunal to strike out all of Macken’s discrimination claims, saying some of the claims are out of time. Other claims including a failure to run a whisteblowing procedure will be heard at a later hearing.

As part of Macken’s previous claim, she is entitled to future pay at a salary of £177,000 a year until her retirement due to being signed off work from ill health. She is also now fighting to raise her salary in line with inflation, arguing that a 5% cap is discriminatory.

Lawyers for Macken have estimated that her new claim would entitle her to a pay out net total of £3.8 million made up of lost salary, holiday and pension, as well as injury to feelings and aggravated damages.

Top photo: The BNP Paribas SA headquarters in London.