Leighton Associates

Employment law, insolvency and AML research and reporting
Te Rangahau ture Mahi me te tari Purongo
Demystifying employment law since 2019
 

Company liquidations remain elevated in 2026, with the IRD continuing a firm enforcement approach. Practitioners regularly encounter files featuring provable tax debts alongside penal liabilities such as court-imposed fines and reparation orders, which sit outside the normal insolvency distribution framework. When these penal elements surface, a structural tension is exposed – one that Parliament has long recognised and chosen not to fix. The Legal Framework S 303(1) of the C

Stories of employees getting ambushed and stitched up in employment mediations are nothing new to us, in fact Leighton Associates was born of a couple of such stitch-ups and subsequent enforcement action (Tauranga City Council v Brown aka ALA v ITE, Victoria University of Wellington v Sawyer, both 2017), and kept busy by several since. Today we have been treated to the spectacle of a glorious desecration of an employment NDA (non-disclosure agreement), that was executed in 20

With company liquidations at a 15-year high, what happens when there is an existing personal grievance claim against a company that is put into liquidation? It makes economic sense that any personal grievance against that company dies with it. However, legally there is a strong distinction between wage arrears and holiday pay, and personal grievance remedies and since 2016 it has been possible for employees to pursue the director(s) for wage arrears and holiday pay if these

The Federal Trade Commission has ordered Rollins Inc. – one of the largest pest-control companies in the United States – to stop enforcing noncompete agreements against more than 18,000 employees nationwide. The agency also sent warning letters to 13 other companies in the pest control industry that employ many thousands more workers, urging the firms to review their employment agreements to ensure they do not contain any unfair or anticompetitive noncompete provisions. The

Liquidators do a thankless job. They are called in to salvage what is left of a company after it has failed. Sometimes the company will have no assets at all, meaning there is nothing left to cover the liquidator’s fees. Why on earth would anyone do this for a living? Well, liquidators have a powerful weapon in their arsenal. Under sections 292 and 293 of the Companies Act 1993, a liquidator can set aside an insolvent transaction or charge that has been entered into withi

The Auckland High Court has upheld the initial guilty finding and sentence of former Port of Auckland Chief Executive, Tony Gibson, after stevedore, Pala'amo Kalati, was killed at the port in August 2020 by a falling container. The Auckland High Court has upheld the initial guilty finding and sentence of former Port of Auckland Chief Executive, Tony Gibson, after stevedore, Pala'amo Kalati, was killed at the port in August 2020 by a falling container. "Our thoughts continue t