Sportpesa on Thursday sent its sacked employees emails calling them for a meeting at their office.
The email was from the firm’s head of human resources, Terry Wanja Njagi.
According to K24 Digital, the meeting between Sportpesa and its former employees lasted for only 20 minutes.
The former employees were told that their termination letters have been replaced with redundancy letters.
“They [SportPesa management] did not give us the information we expected [that we’ll have our jobs back]. In the extremely brief meeting, they said that our termination letters were withdrawn and that we will, instead, be served with redundancy notices as the Kenyan law demands,” one of the employees who didn't want his name mentioned told K24 Digital.
According to Section 2 of Kenya’s Employment Act 2007, redundancy refers to the loss of a job through the employer's initiative because of various reasons.
Serving an employee with a redundancy letter helps a company avoid facing a lawsuit, and that's what Sportpesa did.
“We are basically being advised to issue proper and legal notices even as we wait for the Betting Control and Licensing Board to act on our application,” Sportpesa CEO Ronald Karauri said as quoted by K24 Digital.
The former employees had gone to the meeting hoping for good news about being called back to their jobs.