A federal appeals court Wednesday reversed a lower court ruling in an age discrimination lawsuit filed against a Hewlett-Packard Co. unit and held a terminated employee can proceed with his litigation.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. hired Robert Sloat in 2011 to develop training programs for its salespeople and over the next five years he received “notably positive” reviews, according to the ruling by the 6th U.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati in Robert Sloat v. Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.

His fortunes began to change in October 2016 when he was transferred to a different group, where at age 60 he was the oldest person reporting to his new manager.

Among subsequent incidents, the manager told him, “You’ve got old skills,” and asked him on at least 10 occasions when he intended to retire, the ruling said.

Mr. Sloat was terminated and filed suit in U.S. District Court in  Knoxville, Tennessee, charging age discrimination and retaliation in violation of the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act and state law.

The district court granted Hewlett-Packard summary judgment dismissing the case and was reversed by a unanimous three-judge appeals court panel.

One of Hewlett-Packard’s responses to the alleged retirement badgering was that the manager’s inquiries were “not frequent,” the ruling said.

“That response is inexplicable: one or two inquiries along the same lines from one’s boss might be dismissed as isolated; even more inquiries could form a pattern; but ten inquiries, a jury could easily find, is a campaign.”

The manager’s retirement inquiries “also support an inference that (the manager) engaged in a series of actions, driven by bias, whose intended effect was to drive Sloat out of the company,” the ruling said.

Mr. Sloat “has presented evidence from which a jury could reasonably find” that the manager “acted with the intention of having Sloat terminated,” the ruling said, concluding also that “much of the same” evidence supports his retaliation claim.

The case was remanded for further proceedings.

Attorneys in the case did not respond to requests for comment.