A senior manager involved in the lewd cake privacy case has disappeared from the company's records after it was criticised for its "shameful" behaviour.

NZCU Baywide was ordered on Monday to pay former Hastings branch employee Karen Hammond a record sum of nearly $170,000 after it breached her privacy by circulating a photo of a cake she baked, iced with the words "NZCU f . . . you".

Human resources manager Louise Alexandra was one of the bosses accused of bullying a young employee into accessing the photo, which was on a Facebook page restricted to Hammond's friends. Another manager, Grant Porter, then distributed the photo in an effort to stop Hammond finding future work.

On Monday, when the Human Rights Review Tribunal published its damning judgment on the case, Alexandra was listed on the NZCU website as one of the management team.

By yesterday, she had vanished, although Porter is still there.

Ironically, when asked why this was, the company cited privacy as a reason for refusing to say.

Asked why Alexandra was no longer on the site, and what action had been taken, if any, against the employees identified in the decision, NZCU general manager of marketing and communications Andrew Quayle said the company had "taken legal advice on privacy relating to these questions" and "it is not appropriate for NZCU Baywide to make any comments about the employees that were involved in this matter".

Meanwhile, a marketing expert said the NZCU Baywide brand would have suffered significant damage from the case.

Evolve Marketing managing director Brandon Wilcox said the fact the company took the decision "on the chin" and had said it would not file an appeal "was a positive factor".

"If they had a 50/50 chance of winning, they'd lose in the court of public opinion. If they fought it, they'd look like sore losers," Wilcox said.

"An even better thing to have done would have been not to sully themselves with unethical behaviour in the first place, especially in an age of social media," he said.