Ex-Wilson Parking boss accused of ‘poisoning’ relationships with landlords before jumping ship

Friday, 26 June 2026

An ex-employee of Wilson Parking has been accused of “poisoning” its relationships with landlords, leaving them on short-term contracts and then “swooping in” for their business.

Peter Turner provided ambiguous answers during cross examination in Employment Court on Friday, with Wilson’s lawyer Rachael Reed KC often having to repeat questions.

He denied bad-mouthing Wilson to landlords and secretly creating a second company to hide car parking clients from the company and the court, despite one client previously being on a list he supplied to court.

Turner is facing several accusations of contract breaches, including sabotaging contracts before he resigned as Wilson’s head of South Island operations in September 2023, and allegedly using confidential information to start Mainland Parking.

As the trial reached the mid-way point of a four-week trial on Friday, Reed continued her cross examination before Judge Helen Doyle.

Reed challenged Turner on several of his claims. An important point of contention is exactly how senior Turner was in his role as South Island regional manager. It is possible that if Wilson cannot convince the judge of Turner’s particular seniority and responsibility to the company, then any proven wrongdoing may not meet the threshold for Wilson’s foreshadowed desired outcome of $25 million in remedies and/or damages.

Turner and his lawyers have said he was a mid-tier manager at best, with at least three people more senior above him in the company. He said nothing he did was a secret because he would often work alongside or get advice from a senior executive or even Wilson’s chief executive, Ryan Orchard.

Whether he told them directly about early termination clauses with no cause is in dispute, but Turner argued the leases were uploaded to the company’s system by a different employee.

“It was there at their fingertips for whenever they wanted to see it,” he said.

“Any good business would have checks and balances, right?”

Reed argued their high level of trust in him, including years of performance reviews where Turner was marked 100% for integrity, left Wilson “vulnerable to any breach of your integrity”.

“I guess so,” Turner eventually said to repeated questions about trust.

At one point, Reed spoke to Turner’s CV, which she said described him as a highly senior employee with high level of autonomy and responsibility. Turner resisted accepting those were his words, saying someone else wrote it for him, but ultimately accepted it was the truth.

If true, then it directly contradicted Turner’s evidence before the court about him not being very senior at Wilson, Reed argued.

Reed also accused Turner of bad-mouthing Wilson to landlords while he worked there: “You spoke in disparaging terms about Wilson to these landlords, poisoning the relationship, didn’t you?”

Turner denied this, but accepted he had called Wilson’s head office “the w…ersup north” to an agent linked to lease agreement.

Reed suggested Turner had advised Wilson to stay away from leases so he could “swoop in and attract their business”, advising the company in his handover nothing could be done about some monthly renewal contracts, or that even contacting a certain landlord was a bad idea.

However, when Turner did sign some of the landlords after leaving Wilson they agreed to years-long contracts, Reed pointed out.

Turner refuted he was setting the landlords up for himself, insisting he was giving accurate advice at the time, the market had changed and some landlords just did not like Wilson.

“Was it just coincidence that at this point, in September 2023, you say [the contract] needs to stay on monthly, and by June 2024 that’s all changed and you get, what, six years?” Reed pressed.

“As you’ve probably heard, the market is pretty dynamic here and things change,” Turner replied.

Through a different line of questioning, Reed reminded the court of the existence of TPM Holdings Ltd, a company Wilson claims Turner secretly created just six weeks after a court order in late 2025 preventing him from disposing of or transferring leases away from Mainland Parking.

During a prolonged back and forth, Turner continued to insist the company was not his, though did agree that he was involved in picking the name, operating the business, and that his wife was the sole beneficiary through a trust.

He admitted to signing new business opportunities through TPM because Mainland Parking was facing legal action, including the Christchurch City Council-owned site of 129 Gloucester St.

He further admitted TPM related documents had not been provided to Wilson during disclosure, but insisted this was an honest mistake.