A boss of gaming giant Rockstar - the firm behind Grand Theft Auto - has said claims the firm tried to keep tabs on union membership are "completely untrue"

Rob Scampinato, vice president of HR, told an employment tribunal they tried to "keep abreast" of collective grievances, but were not trying to root out trade union activists.

The case centres on the dismissal almost a year ago of 34 workers, most of them based in Edinburgh, who claim they were unfairly sacked for trade union activity.

Rockstar, which is due to launch Grand Theft Auto 6 next month, maintains they were dismissed for "sharing confidential company information" in an insecure private online forum.

The claim for unfair dismissal is being brought by 23 former staff, represented by the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain (IWGB)

Most of them were based at the flagship Rockstar North development studio in Edinburgh, described as the "home" of the Grand Theft Auto series.

The tribunal hearing in Glasgow heard an anonymous employee, known as AB, had been feeding information to another HR manager, Charlie Kinloch, who then passed it on to Scampinato, since early 2024.

Some of it included records of union meetings and details of union recruitment activity.

Richard O'Keefe, representing the claimants, put it to Scampinato that he and Kinloch were trying to monitor IWGB membership at the company.

O'Keefe asked him: "Why didn't you tell Charlie Kinloch at this point… you need to tell AB to stop sharing with you information about trade union members and their activities, that's none of our business to be surveilling?"

Spampinato denied this was the purpose, and said he was not aware the information had been "solicited".

When O'Keefe put it to him that he had asked Kinloch to "keep tabs" on union membership at the company, he replied: "That's categorically not true."

He later told the hearing he could not recall any explicit instructions or discussions about obtaining information on union membership.

"I didn't give Charlie [Kinloch] an instruction to stop - or to start," he said.

Much of the information passed by AB to managers related to discussions on a Discord server which had been set up by employees as a private workplace discussion space.

Rockstar's lawyer previously told the hearing the Discord server had about 350 members, including 10 people who no longer worked for the company.

Scampinato said it was "reasonably true" that receiving information about forum posts allowed managers to keep abreast of collective grievances.

He confirmed that he shared information about the posts on the Discord server with another senior Rockstar Games executive, studio director Jennifer Kolbe.

But he said it was "categorically untrue" that they were monitoring it with the aim of removing trade union members or suppressing union activity.

The IWGB union has alleged material posted on the Discord forum was used as a "union busting" pretext for getting rid of staff who were simply trying to secure better working conditions.

Rockstar denies this, maintains they were dismissed for gross misconduct following the sharing of confidential company information, and says this had nothing to do with trade union membership or activity.

The tribunal heard that a total of 722 posts across 109 Discord threads were cited in the accusations of gross misconduct against the sacked employees.

These had been passed to senior HR staff by AB and other unnamed Rockstar employees in 2024 and 2025.

Asked why the firm waited until October 2025 to sack them, Scampinato said the company was by then in "crisis mode" because of delays in the development of Grand Theft Auto 6 and needed the team to be "fully focused".

"We were in a moment when we knew we were running late on the development," he said.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is expected to break sales records when it is released on 19 November.

But the release has already been delayed twice, in autumn 2025 and May 2026. There have been leaks, the biggest in 2022 when a hacker revealed key character and plot details.

The previous instalment in the franchise became one of the best-selling games of all time after it was released in September 2013.

Pre-orders of the new game - which features the series' first female playable character Lucia and her partner Jason as the main protagonists - are already thought to have been worth hundreds of millions of pounds.

The tribunal before judge Lucy Wiseman continues.