I've been lurking for a while and finally got a story i can share with you guys.
I recently got headhunted for a new job in my field with less hours, waaaaay better pay and pretty much unlimited home office, only snag was they needed me to start yesterday (in my country every employer can set his own notice period (to an extend, can't go over a certain amount of months)) so i needed to end my employment with my now ex employer ASAP. Because of the short notice i had to breach the notice period, which in my country means one of two things – either the employer and employee need to reach a mutual agreement to terminate a contract or the employee has to pay a fine which equals a months worth of gross pay for each month of breached notice.
Now, while i was gearing up to leave i made sure that everything was handed over and that the customer for whom the company was providing the service was not going to be impacted in any way, which was confirmed by the manager on the clients side to my manager at my ex employers side. Even with all of that done on my part, they refused to handshake on waiving my notice because (and i quote) “It's company procedure”. Now I'm not in the best health and I've taken a few sick leaves and since the handing over of sick papers now happens electronically, I'm not obligated to bring them the papers.
Here comes the victory, even though I'm not forced to hand over my sick leave papers, the employer is obligated to have the paper originals on file for 10 years after i quit or they get a massive fine. Welp, they want a stack of maybe 10 sick papers from the past 2 years and they're not getting JACK. Greed out and make me pay to leave ? No worries, have fun paying at least 10x that amount in fines.