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The Birmingham employment tribunal has ordered a former employee of the now-defunct LloydsPharmacy to pay out nearly £19k to a subsidiary of the private equity firm that bought the chain in 2022 after it was alleged he submitted forged sick notes as evidence to support his case.

Mohammed Razwan was ordered to pay £18,750 in court costs to Hallo Healthcare, which is owned by PE firm Aurelius and still operates AAH Pharmaceuticals and the LloydsClinical website.

Mr Razwan, who worked for LloydsPharmacy between July and November 2022, had brought claims against Hallo Healthcare in October 2024 on grounds including racial discrimination, unlawful dismissal, sick pay and legal fees.

But the judge sided with Hallo Healthcare, which argued that Mr Razwan had never been its employee and that his contact had instead been with LloydsPharmacy Ltd. The company also argued that his claim was made “significantly out of time”.

The judge said: “I find that no sustainable claim can be brought by the claimant against the respondent because it was never a legal entity against which he could sue.

“Accordingly, I find that the claimant’s claim has no reasonable prospects of success as he is pursuing no corporate identity against which liability could attach.”

While she recognised that confusion may have arisen from the fact that LloydsPharmacy at one point operated under the Hallo Healthcare brand, the judge found that Mr Razwan engaged in “scandalous and unreasonable conduct” in pursuing the case after repeatedly being told that “he had the wrong respondent”.

The judge also noted that Mr Razwan had separately brought a claim against LloydsPharmacy – “the correct entity” – but that this claim was also made too late for it to proceed.

The tribunal heard claims that in an October 2025 hearing, Mr Razwan had submitted as evidence a PDF sick note “purportedly from the claimant’s GP” back in 2022 that stated he was unable to work but which Hallo Healthcare alleged to be “a fabrication” based on an analysis of the PDF showing changes had been made to it in October 2025.

Judge Manley struck out Mr Razwan’s claim on the grounds of it having no chance of succeeding. She also made the unusual decision to order him to pay Hallo Healthcare’s legal costs, citing his “scandalous and vexatious” conduct.

Mr Razwan did not attend the June hearing in which employment judge Isabel Manley set out her reasoning, as he believed the hearing should be postponed because of his pending appeal against an anonymity order being refused by three previous judges.