(Bloomberg) -- A former BNP Paribas SA equities lawyer lost his fight for a €1.5 million ($1.6 million) payout after being fired for using a racial slur to describe a colleague, likening another to Cambodian dictator Pol Pot and calling his boss a vulgar name.

The Paris employment tribunal on Wednesday backed the dismissal of Benoit Faure for gross misconduct and rejected his claim for compensation and bonuses, a clerk said by phone. Fuller details won’t be available for weeks.

The Faure case first made headlines in a January 2022 article in the UK’s Telegraph newspaper about one of his London-based teammates, who’d kept his job even after an investigation found that he mocked a colleague with an Asian stereotype.

The article didn’t name Faure but listed the racial slur he made in an email, triggering another internal investigation and ultimately his dismissal later that year. At the time, Faure was global head of the legal team in charge of debt and equity capital markets.

BNP declined to comment on the Paris ruling. Faure said he plans to appeal but declined to comment further because the tribunal hasn’t yet provided its written reasoning.

Faure previously told Bloomberg he “of course expressed regrets when he was summoned for the dismissal interview.” He also said Pol Pot was a nickname invented by another BNP staffer and commonly used for a top manager known to have been tasked with achieving a 15% reduction in personnel costs in the investment bank’s legal division.

The way companies react to race- and sex-discrimination claims has faced higher public scrutiny in the wake of the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements. In a British case, judges last week decided an Apple Inc. employee had been unfairly fired for racist comments because the company failed to set out a zero-tolerance policy and there was evidence colleagues took his remarks as a joke and weren’t offended.

During a hearing last month, Faure’s attorney claimed the dismissal was unfair as the bank violated his privacy. He argued that the offensive language, while inappropriate, was contained in emails to a couple of teammates and was never said directly to the people concerned. 

“You can argue about morality, but it’s a strictly private matter,” Faure’s attorney, Paul Van Deth, said. “It can’t be a reason for dismissal.”

BNP’s attorney Sophie Brezin countered during the hearing by saying that the messages were not as private as Faure claimed, and that their content belied the image he presented during his three decade career.

“The facade is polished, but underneath it’s dreadful,” Brezin said after having read out the nine messages that got Faure fired. “He’s a lawyer, he knows the weight of his words.”

(Updates with BNP declining to comment in the fifth paragraph)

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