Wilson Parking offered witness legal protection, potential job, if he turned on alleged co-conspirator

Tuesday, 23 June 2026

Wilson Parking told its star witness he would be protected from legal action and might even get work with the company again if he turned on its ex-employee-turned-rival Peter Turner.

The Employment Court heard on Tuesday how a former senior executive of Wilson, who admits to being “instrumental” in an alleged conspiracy against the company and has name suppression, came to be a witness.

A cooperation agreement between him and Wilson was revealed to include multiple benefits on condition of providing “sufficient information” in Wilson’s allegations against Turner, the founder of Christchurch-based Mainland Parking.

Turner is facing several allegations of contract breaches, including sabotaging client contracts and relationships, and using confidential information to start the rival company.

Turner may not get his day in court until next week, but in the meantime, Mainland lawyer Olivia Jarvis questioned the senior executive on a cooperation agreement he signed with Wilson.

The agreement included a promise by Wilson Parking to consider the senior executive for a consultancy role within the company, as well as protection from legal action by Wilson, should he become a witness.

“The protection that you’ve been given by Wilson is contingent on your continued cooperation,” Jarvis put to the senior executive, who confirmed that was the case.

Through her questioning, it was also revealed Wilson Parking was heavily involved in drafting the man’s brief of evidence.

Jarvis described his evidence as a “construction” or “reconstruction” by Wilson Parking as it relied on emails and documents Wilson showed the senior executive to fill in the blanks of his memory. His initial affidavit grew from about 14 pages to 58, Jarvis said.

The senior executive said Wilson’s team interviewed him over hours with a recording device, and then “came back with a statement they thought was my statement,” he said.

He said he then spent several days going over it with a lawyer, fixing details that he thought were not quite right.

Jarvis questioned the senior executive about three examples in his evidence where he said he may have shared confidential lease information, or perhaps Turner just knew from memory, or perhaps the landlords told him.

“I can’t recall,” he said regarding one example, which suggested Turner received confidential information from the senior executive.

“So you’re guessing?” Jarvis asked.

The senior executive said he agreed to work with Wilson because “coming clean” had been a better option than standing by a company he had no financial stake in.

During a re-examination, Wilson lawyer Rachael Reed KC asked the senior executive to speak to the sensitivity of information he secretly passed onto Turner after Turner resigned.

Although the witness said it should “probably” have been kept with Wilson, he did not use the word confidential.

He would also not speculate as to why Turner asked for a significantly valuable document belonging to Wilson less than two weeks before he left the company, which Wilson has claimed Turner misused despite it not being discovered in a search order.

The court has previously heard that document was necessary for Turner to do his job at the time.

The executive also appeared to put some distance between himself and the fledgling business after Turner resigned. Although he admitted to signing an agreement while employed with Wilson which gave him the option to buy 50% of the company for $1 in the future, the senior executive said at the time the company was not official.

He said the plan had been “let’s just keep things on ice, keep landlords happy, and see how things transpire going forward,” after Turner left.

At Reed’s questioning, the senior executive repeated his evidence from Monday that he intentionally kept tenure short on leases to make it easier for Turner, himself, or somebody else to take Wilson’s clients.

“I didn’t feel at that point Wilson deserved the tenure, with the way they were behaving,” he said.