A HAMPSHIRE businessman, branded 'a boss from hell', has been jailed for seven months for ripping off a former employee of a court settlement.

Maxine Brooks had been awarded £31,500 in October 1997 after successfully suing Paul Doney for sexual harassment.

She had thrown in her job after Doney had bullied her, taunted her with a foot-long wooden penis and bombarded her with tales of his sexual exploits on business forays.

But Doney callously wound up his company, Marchwood-based Charleroi International, to deliberately avoid paying her - and then re-launched the firm under another name.

Yesterday she won her four-year battle for justice with the news that Doney, 56, had finally handed over her money - and had been put behind bars.

Doney, of Silverdale, New Milton, had been given a three months deadline to find the cash, with the promise he would receive a lesser sentence, after pleading guilty to fraudulent trading.

His lawyer Patrick Gibbs told Southampton Crown Court he had handed over the award and nearly £3,000 out of the £9,000 interest. Passing sentence, Judge Jeremy Burford QC told Doney - who had been the company's sole director and principal shareholder - that the most serious aspect of the case was his flouting of the tribunal order.

He said the offence was so serious that only a custodial sentence was appropriate.

But he deliberately jailed him for seven months so he could be released on parole to spend Christmas with his wife and two children, as well as take up a job offer with a Yorkshire furniture company in the New Year.

Mr Gibbs said Doney had spent the last three months in Malaysia and Indonesia scouring for materials for the firm.

Of the offence, he said Doney had "acted with his head rather than his heart, exceptionally foolishly which has revisited him many fold by the proceedings in this case and continues to do so.

"In the last two or three months he has been sitting in a hotel room in Indonesia suffering from what a doctor might diagnose as clinical depression, staring at the wall. His company was built up by his own hard work.

"He has worked seven days a week like so many self-employed businessmen do, building it work, and the idiocy in doing in what he did and re-acting as the way he re-acted to the industrial tribunal adjudication has rendered all these years to nothing.''

Miss Brooks, 59, who lives in Southampton, said the sentence was ''wonderful news''.

She added: ''He has brought this on himself because of his greed and arrogance.

''The last five years have been tortuous for me with lots of highs and lows. I was just so determined and angry at what he had done.

''I feel vindicated now and anyone who has been treated intolerably in the workplace should hopefully learn from this.''

Miss Brooks, who worked as a sales and marketing manager for Mr Doney described him as ''a foul-mouthed boss from hell.''

She said she probably would not have taken an employment tribunal case against him if he had paid her redundancy money she was due when she left his firm.

When she contacted her union, the Manufacturing, Science and Finance Union for help she only mentioned her salary believing that Mr Doney's sexual remarks were probably typical for such a small company.

MSF officials were shocked when they heard details of the abuse Miss Brooks had suffered and supported her case.

The Union's general secretary Roger Lyons said: ''This is a famous victory which will go down in the history of our country as vindication of a five year battle by a very brave and courageous woman.

''The cause of justice has now been served and that custodial sentence sends out a very powerful message that sexual harassment can not only damage your health, it can put you in prison.''

The union praised the Department of Trade and Industry for taking the case against Mr Doney.