‘Glad you didn’t get a penny’: cafe boss gloats over unpaid tribunal money

A London cafe chain popular with MPs and journalists failed to pay tens of thousands of pounds to employees it unfairly dismissed.

The employment tribunal ordered the owners of Crussh to compensate two former members of staff. However, the company twice declared insolvency and never paid either worker, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) has found.

A director even messaged one of the former employees to say he was glad he “didn’t get a penny” from the company because he deserved “fuck all” – having already reopened one of the cafes under a different name.

TBIJ has today revealed that thousands of people who have won employment tribunal judgments have not been paid what they are owed. In hundreds of these cases this is because companies were wound up before they could be forced to pay up.

Raf, a 48-year-old former area manager who had worked for the business for 20 years, won his case against Crussh in late 2024. The company then shut down its eight remaining juice bars. By February, when the tribunal ordered Crussh to pay Raf over £30,000, it had stopped trading.

When liquidators were later appointed, Bulent Mustafa, a company director who Raf had described as rude and unprofessional to the tribunal, messaged him to celebrate the fact that the company would not have to pay up.

“I wish you had the balls of a real man to say it to my face which you are not … So go fck [sic] yourself,” Mustafa wrote on WhatsApp.

Having shut the company down, Mustafa and the other former directors of Crussh have since reopened the Millbank location under a new name: Artisan Fork. Despite the fact that it is the same operation run by the same directors in the same location, Artisan Fork exists as a completely separate business to Crussh – and so owes Raf nothing.

Located just a short distance from the Houses of Parliament, in a building that’s home to the BBC and ITV’s Westminster studios, it is frequented by politicians and journalists. In 2022, when it was still operating under the Crussh brand, Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat even launched his leadership campaign on its doorstep.

This is the second time in less than two years that Crussh’s owners have put one of their companies through insolvency proceedings during a live employment dispute. In October 2024, the tribunal awarded £20,000 compensation to another former employee who had been unfairly dismissed.

There is no suggestion that either of the insolvency proceedings connected to Crussh were part of a deliberate attempt to avoid paying their ex-employees what they were owed.

Andy McDonald MP, who was previously responsible for Labour’s employment rights policies, said that what happened to Crussh’s former employees illustrates the “enormous difficulties” workers face in enforcing judgments in their favour.

He said the employment rights bill currently passing through parliament will strengthen workers’ rights, but said directors and owners of companies should be made directly liable for non-payment of employment tribunal awards.

“The idea that employers so close to parliament – in a media venue well-known to many parliamentarians – are refusing to pay out should help underline the need for urgent action."

‘Absolute hell’

At its peak, Crussh ran 34 cafes in London and the south-east, had partnerships with catering companies, supermarkets and leisure centres, and even published a recipe book.

Raf joined the company as it was expanding and worked his way up from the bottom of the company hierarchy to become an area manager. At one point he had responsibility for 10 locations and oversaw the opening of new outlets.

After a fall in sales during the pandemic, the chain was bought by a group of investors, including tech entrepreneur Jason Collins. Collins is one of the founders of workplace services provider Apogee, which was sold to Hewlett Packard in 2018 in a deal that valued the company at £380m.

He and the other new investors in Crussh decided to restructure the company when they took over. The central kitchen, which supplied supermarkets, was controlled by Healthier Tastier Foods Ltd, while Crussh Retail Ltd ran the juice bars and employed its staff.

However, after one of its biggest customers cancelled a contract and directors discovered the central kitchen was making losses, Healthier Tastier Foods was put into administration.

As part of the restructuring Raf was dismissed from his role and demoted to store manager, a job that included preparing smoothies and cleaning. He resigned and started legal proceedings.

“It was absolute hell,” Raf said. “I never went through things like that. I never had to because I was a loyal employee for two decades until the company was taken over by those people.”

The case took over his life for a year and a half. He spent more than £1,000 getting solicitors to draft documents and also received pro bono assistance from legal charities, but most of the work he did by himself.

With legal documents spread all over his room, he spent his days reading up on the law and watching YouTube videos on how to cross-examine witnesses. He said he’d go to sleep and wake up thinking about the case. Sometimes he’d wake suddenly in the middle of the night and need to jot down a thought about the case.

He said the stress of facing several company witnesses and an experienced barrister on his own was “enormous”, and he was diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder.

“If I can compare the stress to anything I experienced in my life, it was two and a half years ago when my mother was passing away from cancer,” he said.

Neither Mustafa nor Collins responded to our requests for comment.

When approached for this story, Tom Kasapis, one of Crussh’s directors, told the BBC that the language in the text message was “wholly inappropriate and does not reflect the company’s or the directors’ values.”

He said that they respected the tribunal’s judgment but “the unfortunate reality is that the insolvency process means not all creditors, including former employees, are able to receive their full awards”.

Artisan Fork was “a separate venture established independently of Crussh Retail Limited, with a new structure and funding,” he said.

Footing the bill

By the time Raf was awarded compensation, Crussh’s juice bars had closed and Crussh Retail Ltd had started speaking to insolvency practitioners.

When companies become insolvent the government will cover some payments owed to former employees. Raf has been able to secure almost half the money he is owed this way, but is unlikely to get the rest of his judgment.

As part of the liquidation process, Crussh’s directors have said the company’s debts amount to nearly £1m, while its only asset is £23,000 in cash.

None of the ongoing leases or equipment in the shuttered juice bars are mentioned in liquidation documents. It is understood that the physical assets were all owned by the individual subsidiary companies that were set up for each branch.

Victoria Quinn, an assistant legal officer for the Free Representation Unit, who supported Raf with his claim, said that while some workers can get part of what they are owed from the insolvency service, “that’s a partial win for the claimant, and it’s a complete evasion of accountability for the employer”.

Raf still gets angry when he thinks about how Crussh Retail Ltd went insolvent right after he got his judgment.

“Friends advised me: ‘Just leave it. You are fighting windmills – better focus on finding new jobs’… [but] I decided to fight, and I still feel I’ve done right,” he said.

“Whenever you think you have been treated unlawfully you should stand up and fight for your rights.”