“A consultancy company with a five-man board, consisting of four shareholders and an operational director, discovered that the latter, as it is called, had an ‘affective relationship’ with a female employee, one of his subordinates, who was the sister-in-law of one of the other board members to boot. In itself, having a relationship at work is not forbidden – they happen – but the problem was that the man, when asked about this relationship, continued to deny it categorically. An investigation of his laptop proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that a relationship did exist. The company I represented maintained that the man's continued denial of this relationship had caused an irreparable breach of trust, when it became clear that said relationship did, in fact, exist. In its ruling, the Subdistrict Court judge considered that ‘denial solely because the relationship is a private matter, does not attest to the insight that could be expected of this employee in view of his position.’ I thought this a fitting example of the varied nature of our Labour law practice, not in the least because this ruling has been published as well.”