LONDON UNDERGROUND has thrown at least £250,000 down the tube trying to defend its indefensible victimisation of train operator Arwyn Thomas, RMT has estimated.

Six-figure legal fees, management time spent preparing for and attending six days of tribunals, including senior managers on £600-plus a day, on top of Arwyn’s salary – paid on the orders of an interim hearing in January – add up at least to the cost of employing 20 modern apprentices for a year, the union says.

RMT general secretary Bob Crow said today:

“London Underground knew in January that their case against Arwyn Thomas, like that against Eamonn Lynch, had fallen flat on its face when the interim tribunal judged that Arwyn had been sacked for his trade-union activities.

The interim tribunal judge even suggested that LUL go outside for 15 minutes, think about it and re-instate him, but instead they have squandered huge sums of public money on trying to defend the indefensible.

Our legal team estimates that LUL’s legal bill alone will have run to six figures.

On top of that they had up to a dozen managers attending six days of tribunal hearings, untold HR and management time spent preparing for them and huge personnel and media resources wasted on trying to spin their way out of it, including internal bulletins.

We reckon that adds up to at least a quarter of a million and could well be a lot more – and that’s before we add the tribunal costs that also come out of taxpayers’ pockets.

That is a shameful waste of money that could have been spent on developing, maintaining and staffing the tube.

The time has come to call a halt and to start investing in building better industrial relations – and that has to start with treating staff and their unions fairly."