Mirror pays Piper £400,000 for taking job away

The newspaper publisher Trinity Mirror gave Ric Piper more than £400,000 in compensation and a grovelling apology yesterday for tearing up his contract as finance director a day before he was due to begin the job.

Mr Piper, whose job offer was rescinded because of a profit warning at his previous employer, the engineering consultancy WS Atkins, had been due to begin a High Court damages claim against the publisher of the Mirror newspaper yesterday morning. But Trinity Mirror settled at the door of the High Court in London, agreeing to pay Mr Piper his full contractual entitlement.

On the day of the WS Atkins profit warning in October last year Mr Piper was summoned to a meeting at Gatwick airport with the then chief executive of Trinity Mirror, Philip Graf, and one of the group's non-executive directors, David Marlow. He was told that the job offer had been withdrawn less than 24 hours before he was due to begin work because it was "no longer appropriate" for Mr Piper to join the company.

But yesterday Trinity Mirror was forced to apologise for the damage done to Mr Piper's reputation and his career prospects. "Trinity Mirror is happy to confirm that it does not believe that Mr Piper had any personal responsibility for the problems identified in the Atkins trading statement and is of the view that any criticism of Mr Piper in this regard would be unjustified," the statement said. "Trinity Mirror wishes Mr Piper success in his future career."

In addition to one year's salary of £300,000, Trinity Mirror is understood to have agreed to pay an extra sum taking the final settlement to "comfortably in excess" of £400,000, according to legal sources. Trinity Mirror has also paid Mr Piper's costs.

Had the case gone to court, then the judge would have heard a witness statement from Michael Jeffries, WS Atkins' chairman, absolving Mr Piper of blame for the calamitous profit warning that cost the job of the company's chief executive, Robin Southwell.

Trinity Mirror had offered to keep paying Mr Piper his monthly salary while he found himself a new job. But Mr Piper decided to take the case to court, arguing that it would be difficult to find new employment in light of the way he had been treated by Trinity Mirror. "Until he got this case out of the way, he was damaged goods," one associate said.

The Atkins profit warning was prompted by an unexpected doubling in its debts and the botched introduction of new financial reporting systems which affected billing and cost control. Alerted to the profits warning, Trinity Mirror despatched a representative to Atkins' annual shareholders meeting that day in an effort to establish who was mainly to blame.