Mark Craven said his cousin Chris was ‘like a brother’ to him
Mark Craven with his cousin and best man Chris Craven at his wedding in 2018
A dad told how he felt ‘betrayed’ by his cousin and best man after their business and personal relationship soured.
Mark Craven said he treated his cousin Chris Craven ‘like a brother’ and described him as being his ‘best mate’. But Mark ended up taking Chris to court after they clashed.
The pair, who had gone into business together, became estranged after Chris accused Mark of putting more time into another firm which he had set up. “He was best man at my wedding, he was my best mate,” Mark told the Liverpool Echo.
“He was like a brother and he did all this stupid s**t to me,” Mark claimed his cousin had a ‘vendetta’, against him, filled with suspicion and acrimony.
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He never expected that their relationship, which had previously been socially and professionally successful, would sink to such a level of mistrust that his car would be bugged, he would be tracked across the country, and he would be followed by a private detective who would take pictures of him spending time with his wife and children.
Mark had climbed the ladder at Forrest Fresh Food Ltd, a food and drinks company, since being employed as a driver in 2008 and then later in sales. In 2016 he became a shareholder before being appointed as a director of the multi-million pound company that same year.
Originally from Todmorden, Yorkshire, Mark had moved to the south-east where he worked at a company office in Romford before relocating to Birkdale, Southport, in 2020 with his wife, Maggie, and their children as he worked from the Rochdale office of Forrest Fresh.
Mark Craven(Image: Andrew Teebay Liverpool Echo)
But as he became more involved with his friend’s gym company, VIP HQ, which he had invested in in Essex and Mark and his wife made a decision to open a new gym site in Birkdale village, the relationship with Chris began to sour.
After a tense meeting in February 2022 Chris, who according to legal documents thought Mark wasn’t spending enough time on his work duties, hired a private investigation firm called Trojan to send a former police officer to follow him around Southport.
Court documents show Trojan were found to have tracked the movements of Mark, now 47, from February 25 that year until at least April 29, two months later.
Not only that, the firm also fitted a tracker to the car used by Mark without his knowledge, with Chris claiming it was for insurance purposes. But when the dispute brought the warring cousins to court, this claim which was dismissed by a judge who said it was for the purposes of covert surveillance.
Ironically the reports of the private investigator mostly showed Mark travelling to work from Southport to Rochdale, as he said he was, and not particularly active at the gym business.
A covert photo taken by a private investigator of Mark and his dad at a petrol station on their way to Huddersfield Hospital in 2022
The relationship between Mark and Chris strained further in April 2022 when a meeting between the pair led to Chris claiming Mark wasn’t pulling his weight and not fulfilling his role at the company, despite his private investigators failing to come up with any proof for his accusations.
Three days after the tense meeting, Mark was signed off work for a month due to stress, and never returned to the job he’d put 14 years into.
Just days before he was due to return to the company, Mark and his wife Maggie received a letter containing a list of allegations, as well as proof they had been spied on, and which informed Mark he was suspended from work.
The letter made several allegations that Mark had not worked in the interest of Forrest Fresh Foods, accusations which he denies.
Forrest Fresh’s case was that essentially once Mark began to work with the new business the amount of time he was working with them became ‘erratic’, although no evidence to support this was provided to the latter tribunal which claimed unfair dismissal.
The judge in the tribunal also notes Forrest Fresh did not believe the four week ‘fit note’ Mark had provided to explain his sickness absence and that they thought it was a fraudulent, something which the tribunal judge did not accept and even pointed out showed how shaken Mark had been by the surveillance and accusations levelled at him.
Mark Craven sat in Platform X(Image: Andrew Teebay Liverpool Echo)
Forrest Fresh further claimed ‘manifestly excessive’ spending on Mark’s company credit card and that people he had managed were leaving the company, although again the tribunal found there was no evidence that this was true.
Speaking to the ECHO Mark said: “He was best man at my wedding, he was my best mate. He was like a brother and he did all this stupid s**t to me.
“I said to my wife while I was off that something wasn’t right and I still remember her face. She said to me ‘I don’t know how to show you this but we got something last week’ and I was just confused as to what she meant.
“She showed me a load of documentation, there was a picture of me, me kissing my wife, some with my kids in the background. There were photos of my car, photos of my work car, of me meeting people.”
Among the things Trojan tracked was a 200-mile round trip Mark took, taking his father to Huddersfield for him to have a biopsy for his stomach cancer. The investigator followed him every mile of the journey.
Mark continued: “I still to this day think it can only be some kind of vindictive jealousy as to why he has done this. I feel betrayed. I’ve had to have therapy. This was my career, I felt ripped off. I felt exposed. It nearly destroyed me and it nearly destroyed my marriage.”
In June 2022, Mark was removed as a director of the company, although he was not told about this at the time and Companies House was never updated. The company then stopped paying him during his absence through sickness.
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This is when Mark decided to pursue a claim for unlawful deductions from wages against the company. Mark lost that case but eventually won on appeal. He is waiting to hear what the tribunal’s resolution will be.
Mark made a further claim against Forrest Fresh Foods Ltd for unfair dismissal on the basis that he felt he had no choice but to resign as an employee in February 2023. Mark’s claim was successful, with the tribunal unanimously deciding he had been constructively and unfairly dismissed. In its written judgement the panel said: “From the evidence we have been referred to, the claimant was not the architect of his downfall as alleged. The architect of the claimant’s downfall was Chris Craven.”
Following the unfair dismissal trial in May this year, it was unanimously decided Mark had been constructively and unfairly dismissed on February 3, 2023. He is yet to find out what the tribunal recommends as a remedy to his dismissal.
Mark now owns a bar called Platform X and VIP HQ a soft play centre in Birkdale, as he looks to move on with his life, putting behind him the fallout of the three years and the destruction of his relationship with the man who used to be like a brother to him
Forrest Fresh Food Ltd was approached for comment.