Tayla Lewthwaite had £1.90 in her bank account on the day she was evicted.
She should have had a lot more. Having worked as a duty manager at a trendy London restaurant, she says she endured several months when she was paid less than she’d earned. Exasperated at her treatment, she eventually quit. And once she did, most of her final month’s wages never appeared, as reported TBIJ.
For weeks, she chased it up with the owner, an Australian businessman called Jason Wells. At first, he told her she’d get her money the next day. Then he stopped responding altogether.
With her wages not forthcoming, Tayla was kicked out of her rental property and ended up homeless. She needed the help of a charity to get back on her feet.
Before she quit, she had confronted Wells. “I very clearly said ‘If you do not pay us, I’ll just take you to court,’” Tayla, 32, told us. “He laughed in our faces and said: ‘Fine. Then take me to court.’” To this day, Antipodea has not paid the more than £2,600 she is owed.
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Wells’s reaction might seem blasé, but it appears he already knew he could get away with it. Between 2021 and 2025, the company that ran his Antipodea restaurant chain lost 21 claims at the employment tribunal. We understand the company hasn’t paid any of the sums ordered by those tribunals.
This is alarmingly common in the UK.
Last year, we revealed how more than 5,000 people who won claims have not been paid what they are owed – even after asking the government to help them get it. Since 2016, they have asked for help in recovering awards and settlements totalling more than £46m. More than three quarters of that has gone unpaid.
The hospitality sector in particular is a hotbed for labour abuses and non-payment of tribunal awards.
“It’s the wild west,” said Bryan Simpson, the hospitality lead for Unite, the UK’s largest private sector trade union. “It’s the lowest paid, the most precarious, the most racism, the most sexual harassment of any sector by a country mile.”
Government data shows it is the sector with the highest number of breaches of minimum wage law and Unite has spent thousands of pounds trying to get bosses to pay what tribunals have ordered, Simpson said.
Our own reporting backs this up – most people who spoke to us as part of our investigations into the tribunal system worked in restaurants, cafes or bars. The employers we heard about included a director of a south-London venue who sacked a whistleblower; a restaurant-owning Reform councillor who lost three tribunal claims without paying a single one; and the director of the cafe chain who openly gloated that he would not be handing over the £30,000 payout ordered by the courts.
All of them benefited from a failing enforcement system that allowed them to break the law and simply ignore their punishment. But even within a congested field of rogue and exploitative bosses, Wells stands out from the crowd. He did not respond to our request for comment.
Serial offender
“I’ll smash your fucking teeth down your throat,” Wells snarled at a cyclist in south London during a road rage incident in 2015. “There’s a witness, otherwise I’d break your fucking neck.” The episode, which went viral and was covered in the papers, would not be his last taste of controversy.
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In 2009, Wells had moved to London from Melbourne and founded the Brew cafe chain, which quickly grew to several branches. Six years later, together with millionaire Marc Shimmel, a former WeWork investor, he founded Antipodea. (Schimmel has not been an Antipodea investor since 2019.)
Wells was featured in the press, showing off his home in Richmond or sharing his insights into where, as a successful businessman, he draws his inspiration from. “I’m [...] driven by my staff,” he noted in one interview. “Being able to treat them well is very important to me.”
Yet behind closed doors, this kindness was in short supply.
We have spoken to several of his former staff and analysed hundreds of pages of tribunal and company insolvency documents. Taken together, they give the impression of a man prone to violent verbal outbursts and who repeatedly broke the rules. On numerous occasions his companies withheld money that they owed to employees. And over the course of years, he pocketed hundreds of thousands of pounds from businesses that eventually went insolvent.
One former chef said that after the pandemic, he’d worked for three months without a day off. When he eventually resigned, the company failed to pay his last month’s wages and his unused holiday allowance.
This was a common practice at the company, said a former senior manager.
“Jason wouldn’t pay people who left,” he said. “The company culture was just really toxic.”
And his eruption during the road rage episode was not one-off, according to people we spoke to.
Former staffers alleged other incidents in the workplace. One employee recalled seeing Wells lose his temper with his assistant: “He completely lost it with her … he was screaming.” Another worker who had to take time off due to stress said Wells called him up and told him he would not pay his sick leave until he returned to work. “He threatened me with firing,” said the worker, “he threatened me with ruining my name and I never went back.”
‘The system is broken’
By the time Antipodea called the cops on him, Mark Leonard, 64, and his daughter had tried everything to get the nearly £3,000 the restaurant owed her.
After a year of wrestling with toothless enforcement schemes, Mark wasn’t ready to give up. In early 2024, he started picketing the Kew and Richmond branches, handing out flyers which read: “[Antipodea] has a history of not paying its staff … My daughter has been waiting over a year for her final month’s wages.”
That was when the police were called. But what Mark was doing was completely legal. As he told them, it was Wells, not him, who had broken the law.
Mark said he felt Wells had stolen money from his family. “I didn’t believe that was right or fair,” he said. “My overriding thought was he shouldn’t get away with this.”
Former Antipodea worker
Mark’s daughter had taken the company to an employment tribunal and won. When it refused to pay, they approached a government enforcement scheme and their local MP. Wells and Antipodea dodged every attempt to enforce the judgment.
At one point Mark spoke to Wells on the phone, hoping to convince him to pay his daughter. “He ranted for some considerable time trying to tell me that he was the injured party and everybody else was at fault: the government because of their Covid regulations, his staff who were ripping him off, banks … It was quite something,” he said.
Mark and his daughter also hired high court enforcement officers (a role akin to a bailiff but with greater powers), but they soon discovered the company that owned the restaurant, STR 48, held no assets that could be repossessed.
A report by one officer describes how they went to a couple of restaurants to enforce an award, only to be shown documents detailing how the leases and physical assets were owned by other entities: STR 49 and STR 50.
“I was quite naive in thinking the tribunal system would work,” Mark told us. “Only in digging further have I discovered that the system is broken.”
Tribunal claims are made against companies and in the vast majority of cases it is not possible to bring a claim against a director or owner. This means that, especially with smaller companies, there are several strategies that can be used to avoid paying.
Some companies shut down, only to open up again under a different name, a practice known as phoenixing. Others, like Antipodea, will employ workers through a separate company to the one that holds assets or cash. While this is legal, it means that successful claimants can remain uncompensated.
Michael Jackson, a veteran high court enforcement officer, told us these strategies are particularly common in the hospitality sector, where there is a higher proportion of smaller companies.
“He knew that if he didn’t pay people, [he’d get away with it],” claimed the former senior Antipodea manager. “That’s why he was so comfortable doing it.”
A web of companies
Government records show that Wells had a web of companies, with names ranging from STR 44 to STR 54. Most of these filed dormant company accounts, so it is unclear what their purpose was.
What is clear is that from 2018 his companies racked up more than £10m in debt as well as a string of insolvencies and tribunal claims. In total, businesses owned by Wells have lost 24 employment cases. Company representatives did not turn up to any of the hearings to defend the claims. We could only confirm one instance where the company sent a written response to the tribunal on time.
When his Brew Cafe chain went insolvent, the administrators discovered he had personally borrowed nearly £600,000 from the company that he hadn’t paid back. Liquidators working on the ongoing insolvency process of STR 48 – the second time the Antipodea chain has gone through administration – have also said they suspect there could be “an overdrawn director’s loan account”. They also said the Antipodea chain may have been involved in “potential misuse of government-backed support schemes” although no findings have been made and the liquidators’ investigation continues.
Those insolvency proceedings, which kicked off in June 2024, presented a silver lining for workers who had brought tribunal claims: the government’s redundancy service paid some, though not all, of the money they’d been awarded. In some cases, it came years after they’d won the original claim. To date, only 12 former Antipodea employees who won cases as far back as 2021 have claimed money this way.
The liquidation of STR 48 seems to be the end of the road for Wells, even though his wife continued to briefly operate one of the Antipodea branches under a different company. Fittingly, this company also faced a tribunal claim in September 2025 for unpaid wages – and lost. All of the branches have now closed.
In July 2024, Wells was disqualified as a director for his conduct in relation to a construction company he owned: Ironbark Design and Construct Ltd.
This was followed by a bankruptcy order last February. He is now listed by the government as a tax defaulter to the sum of £150,000, a fraction of the total debts his companies racked up.
But the question remains as to why the system allowed Wells to spend years running businesses that persistently underpaid staff and ignored court judgments.
A government spokesperson said they have already allocated “£25m in funding to tackle the misuse of phoenix companies”.
The money will be given over the next five years and will fund a 50-person taskforce in the Insolvency Service that will investigate directors who liquidate companies to evade debts.
This would not have been enough to ensure workers, such as those at Antipodea, are paid when the company is solvent but holds assets elsewhere.
A group of MPs have recognised these gaps in enforcement and are now calling for changes, including making company directors liable for tribunal awards.
For Bryan Simpson from Unite, the problem within hospitality runs deeper. The government, like society more broadly, treats the sector’s workers with neglect. Even Unite has only started organising them in the last decade. But it is starting to see results, he says, winning millions of pounds for workers through campaigns and strikes, and helping strengthen the law around tipping.
“I have absolutely no faith in the legal system to achieve what is needed to win even individual rights for hospitality workers,” he said. “But there is a major enforcement mechanism which wins – and it’s called unionisation.”
Crime & Courts Correspondent
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