Menzies v Corrigan [2026] NZEmpC 151 - a procedural loss that still avoids the real issues

The Employment Court refused Levi Menzies leave to bring a late challenge against the Employment Relations Authority determination in Corrigan v Prime Focus Security Limited (in liquidation). On the narrow procedural question before the Court, that result is unsurprising. The application was substantially out of time and an earlier challenge had already been discontinued.

But that is not the end of the story. The judgment does not resolve the serious accounting, liquidation, disclosure, company-law, and natural justice issues that have been sitting underneath this case for years. In my view, the entire history has become a case study in people concentrating on tone, personalities, and procedural side battles while repeatedly missing the substance.

The history matters

This did not begin as a dispute about my language, Daniel Church, Catherine Stewart, or litigation conduct. It began with a personal grievance against a company that was already in serious financial difficulty and soon entered liquidation.

The Authority held the original investigation meeting against the company in December 2022. Mr Menzies was not a party in his personal capacity, did not have standing to defend the company once it was in liquidation, was not required as a witness, and was not even notified of the investigation meeting. The Authority nevertheless made awards against the company.

The company was in liquidation. According to the history set out by Tristam Price, Mr Corrigan's debt was not registered with the liquidator. Instead, the case later moved towards an attempt to obtain payment through Mr Menzies personally.

In July 2024, the Authority made a compliance order requiring Mr Menzies to take steps to put the company in funds. That was an extraordinary outcome. A director of a company in liquidation was effectively required to fund company liabilities arising from a personal grievance, despite the ordinary principles of separate legal personality, limited liability, creditor priorities, and control passing to the liquidator.

The legal question was never trivial. Earlier Employment Court authority had recognised the obvious difficulty with using compliance powers to make one person meet the debts of a company in liquidation. Money paid into a liquidated company is ordinarily distributed according to the Companies Act and creditor priorities. An unsecured creditor does not simply jump the queue because the debt arose in the employment jurisdiction.

The liquidation evidence was not a safe foundation

The compliance case relied heavily on a statement in the first liquidator's report that Mr Menzies had taken excessive drawings. Mr Menzies denied saying that and denied siphoning money from the company. Later accounting material was then used to support a narrative that money had been withdrawn to avoid Mr Corrigan's claim and that a phoenix-style business had followed.

I rejected that narrative. I asked for proper accounting assistance because the figures required expert analysis. That did not happen. Instead, disputed accounting records and an untested statement in a liquidator's report became central to an order placing personal financial pressure on a company director.

The liquidation background later became even more troubling. One of the liquidators, Kelera Nayacakalou, was struck off following unrelated disciplinary findings on the same day the compliance determination was issued. A non-publication order meant that development was not known when the original Employment Court documents were prepared. Further material about the people involved in the liquidation emerged only after the first challenge had collapsed.

That does not automatically prove that every part of the liquidation was invalid or that every document was wrong. It does mean the material required far more scrutiny than it received. The document pathway, the completeness of what was supplied, the accounting treatment, and the role of those involved in the liquidation were all matters capable of affecting the reliability of the case against Mr Menzies.

Why non-party discovery was sought from Catherine Stewart

The non-party discovery application did not come out of nowhere. It arose because documents the Authority had directed the liquidator to produce were received and forwarded through Catherine Stewart Barrister's office. That meant the document pathway itself became a legitimate evidential issue.

On 22 March 2024, the Authority directed the liquidator to provide financial statements, interim financial material, the statement of affairs referred to in the first liquidator's report, documents supporting the phrase "excessive drawings", and relevant bank transactions and balances. The direction was made to the liquidator.

On 25 March 2024, Daniel Church emailed the Authority saying that he had received documents from the liquidator over the weekend and asking that they be passed to the Member. In other words, disclosure ordered from a supposedly independent liquidator came through the office acting against Mr Menzies.

That created obvious questions:

• What exactly did the liquidator send to Catherine Stewart Barrister?
• Was everything ordered by the Authority supplied?
• Were there other documents, covering emails, explanations, or communications?
• Was anything withheld, filtered, selected, or misunderstood before it reached the Authority?
• Did the parties and the Authority receive the complete document trail?
• What communications occurred between the liquidator and Ms Stewart's office about the material?

Before the challenge ended, Mr Menzies and I had learned that Ms Stewart had communicated and exchanged documents with the liquidator. The liquidator would not provide the requested information. Ms Stewart did not substantively respond to our request either. By then, the documents had been used to support serious allegations that Mr Menzies had siphoned company money and engaged in phoenix-style activity.

That is why Mr Menzies instructed me to seek non-party discovery from Ms Stewart. The object was to establish the provenance, completeness, and pathway of evidence used against him. It was not random harassment, a personal fishing exercise, or an irrelevant rabbit hole. The application had already been filed and served when the challenge was discontinued because the stay conditions made continuation practically impossible.

My earlier detailed account, including links to the Authority's directions and the email chain, is here: Poor accounting in the ERA: Menzies v Corrigan and the liquidator disclosure problem.

The first challenge became practically impossible

Mr Menzies challenged the Authority determination in time. The Employment Court accepted that the case raised serious and complex issues, including separate legal personality and the reach of the Authority's compliance powers.

But the stay was made conditional on paying more than $33,000 into the Court and paying a further costs award to Mr Corrigan. For someone who did not have that money, the practical result was simple: the challenge could not continue in any meaningful way. It was discontinued in April 2025.

By the time further evidence emerged, the procedural door was nearly closed. A judicial review was filed and later put on hold. The latest application then attempted to revive the statutory challenge route, but it was filed approximately 9 to 10 months late after the first challenge had been discontinued.

Judge Holden refused the extension. Given the delay, the discontinuance, and the history of the proceeding, that result is understandable. But a refusal to extend time is not a judicial endorsement of every factual allegation, every accounting interpretation, or every step taken in the liquidation.

Calling Daniel Church a moron was not the real issue

A remarkable amount of time and energy has been spent on my language and conduct. Catherine Stewart and members of her practice focused heavily on correspondence, criticism, costs, and comments I made about the competence of those involved. One of those comments was that Daniel Church was a moron.

Was that polite? No. Was it the central legal issue? Absolutely not.

Whether I used an insulting word does not answer any of the following:

• Was the liquidation evidence complete and reliable?
• Did the accounting material actually prove siphoning or deliberate avoidance of Mr Corrigan's claim?
• Why was the debt apparently not registered in the liquidation?
• What documents passed between the liquidator and Catherine Stewart's practice?
• Was all relevant material placed before the Authority?
• Could section 137 properly be used to require a director to fund company debts after control had passed to a liquidator?
• How was Mr Corrigan realistically going to recover money from a company already in liquidation?
• Why did a proceeding that produced a paper win generate years of further costs without solving the recovery problem?

Those were the real issues. They affected the legitimacy of the order, the practical interests of both parties, and the wider legal position of company directors. Yet the litigation repeatedly drifted towards arguments about emails, wording, representative conduct, and who had insulted whom.

If even half the effort spent cataloguing my adjectives had been spent properly examining the accounts, the liquidation, the document trail, and the Companies Act, this case may have reached the real issues years ago.

They were trying to put a jail sentence into the wrong proceeding

The word "moron" was not used in a vacuum. It followed a specific procedural dispute in which Daniel Church and Catherine Stewart's team repeatedly referred to imprisonment or other Employment Court sanctions against Mr Menzies.

Those sanctions were raised in Mr Corrigan's Statement of Defence. Counsel later wanted joint memoranda to record that sanctions, including a jail sentence, were issues for determination in the existing de novo challenge. I refused.

My position was straightforward. The existing challenge concerned the Authority's compliance determination. If Mr Corrigan wanted the Employment Court to enforce non-compliance and consider the sanctions available under the Act, the proper route was a separate Form 2 Statement of Claim after the necessary compliance process. A jail sentence could not simply be inserted into a Statement of Defence as an additional remedy in the de novo challenge.

The Registrar subsequently confirmed the essential procedural point: the compliance determination stood on its own, and a separate statement of claim was required to seek a compliance order from the Court. The Registrar also indicated that a compliance order was not within the scope of the remedies available in that de novo challenge.

Mr Church had taken the opposite position. He said that because it was a de novo challenge, no fresh Statement of Claim was required and that a Statement of Defence could seek increased or further remedies. In my view, that was plainly wrong.

That procedural dispute is the actual context in which I called Mr Church a moron. I accept the insult was improper. But the Registrar's response confirmed that the legal and procedural objection behind it was correct. The public story has concentrated on the insult while largely ignoring that they were attempting to put imprisonment sanctions before the Court by the wrong route.

The emails, the Registrar's response, and the earlier explanation are published here: Catherine Stewart Barrister - Daniel Church LinkedIn emails (context).

The focus on manners became a convenient distraction

I accept that representatives should usually communicate professionally. I also accept that I am blunt and that some of my language was unnecessarily personal. But professional etiquette cannot become a substitute for legal analysis.

The employment jurisdiction should be capable of distinguishing bad manners from bad law. A representative can speak rudely and still be right about a jurisdictional problem. A barrister can write politely and still advance a weak, impractical, or legally flawed strategy. Tone does not prove the accounts. Tone does not establish a phoenix transaction. Tone does not displace the Companies Act. Tone does not turn a company debt into a director's personal debt.

In my view, the attacks on my language became a sideshow that was useful to those who did not want sustained attention on the liquidation evidence, the accounting problems, the failure to solve the recovery issue, and the extraordinary use of compliance powers against Mr Menzies.

Why I say Catherine Stewart's office handled the matter incompetently

Across my earlier articles, I have identified the following problems with the way Ms Stewart's office, including Daniel Church and Javana Schiphorst, handled the matter:

1. They pursued a director personally without first solving the liquidation and recovery problem. Mr Corrigan had awards against a company in liquidation, but his debt was apparently not lodged with the liquidator as an unsecured creditor. The strategy instead shifted towards forcing the director to fund the company.
2. They relied on confused minimum-entitlement provisions. The case against Mr Menzies personally included repeated reliance on s 142Y and minimum-entitlement concepts even though the substantial awards were personal grievance remedies, not unpaid minimum entitlements.
3. They treated a limited compliance challenge as though the original grievance was being challenged again. Their Employment Court Statement of Defence appeared to assume that the entire constructive dismissal case was being reopened, when the de novo challenge concerned the later compliance determination against Mr Menzies.
4. They sought imprisonment sanctions through the wrong pleading. Jail and other sanctions were placed into the Statement of Defence and proposed joint memoranda rather than pursued through the separate compliance procedure the Registrar later confirmed was required.
5. They did not properly use the liquidation process. My published position is that no unsecured-creditor claim was lodged for Mr Corrigan, even though any ordinary recovery from the company had to occur through the liquidation and according to creditor priorities.
6. They misstated responsibility for company records after liquidation. Ms Schiphorst and Mr Church said Mr Menzies had a personal obligation to hold the company's records for six years, despite the company records and registered office having passed into the liquidator's control.
7. They relied on disputed liquidator material without adequate accounting scrutiny. The "excessive drawings" statement and later accounts became the basis for allegations of siphoning and phoenix activity despite discrepancies, incomplete production, and my request for forensic accounting assistance.
8. They used incomplete production to invite adverse inferences. Mr Church acknowledged that material was missing or of limited utility, but nevertheless invited the Authority to draw conclusions against Mr Menzies from the incomplete accounting record.
9. They placed themselves in the middle of the liquidator's disclosure pathway. Documents ordered from the liquidator came through their office, yet we could not obtain the complete communications and document trail. That is what caused the non-party discovery application.
10. They did not meaningfully answer the request for the document trail. The liquidator refused to provide it, and Ms Stewart did not give us a substantive response before discovery became necessary.
11. Mr Church later denied prior involvement that was evident from the earlier case management history. My site records that he had drafted material and attended a second Authority case management conference to explain it, but later told the Employment Court that he had not previously been involved.
12. They did not initially follow proper procedure to withdraw as counsel. Ms Stewart attempted to deal with withdrawal by an email to the Registrar rather than a proper interlocutory application giving the client an opportunity to respond.
13. They advanced disproportionate settlement demands. Their Calderbank position sought $30,000 for Mr Corrigan and $30,000 plus GST for costs, later reduced to $25,000 and $25,000 plus GST, despite the much narrower personal liabilities then directly imposed on Mr Menzies.
14. They claimed extensive time for minimal opposition documents. After the challenge was discontinued, Ms Stewart sought personal costs against me on the basis of approximately six days of work at $500 per day, although the filed response to non-party discovery comprised a one-page unsworn affidavit and a one-page notice of opposition.
15. They expanded the costs dispute into a barrage of collateral allegations. My position is that the later submissions were unfocused, included material far outside the actual discovery and costs issues, and even included unusual requests involving the Solicitor-General.
16. They put irrelevant or remote correspondence before the Court and then into the public narrative. Material included a "human brain" email written about 11 months before the Employment Court proceeding and marked without prejudice except as to costs, together with correspondence I say was outside the live issues.
17. They concentrated public attention on my language rather than the merits of their own case management. Ms Stewart's side of the story was taken to media before the later costs judgment was released, and I was not given what I regard as a fair opportunity to provide the full context before publication.
18. The strategy produced cost, complexity, and a paper victory rather than practical recovery. The Authority recorded that Mr Corrigan had already paid more than $20,000 in legal costs. Years later, the case had generated further costs, enforcement disputes, and satellite litigation without resolving the basic problem of collecting from a company in liquidation.

Any one procedural mistake can occur in difficult litigation. My criticism is about the accumulation. The wrong statutory concepts, the wrong pleading, the wrong sanctions route, failure to use the liquidation properly, questionable handling of disclosure, weak accounting analysis, withdrawal problems, excessive satellite costs, and then a public campaign about my language all point in the same direction.

In my view, that is not sophisticated litigation. It is a badly managed case that became increasingly expensive and personal because the representatives did not identify and solve the real legal and evidential problems at the outset.

Mr Corrigan was left with a paper victory

None of this requires pretending that Mr Corrigan's original grievance was invented. The point is different. He obtained awards against a company in liquidation, incurred substantial legal expense, and then became involved in years of further litigation aimed at obtaining payment from a director personally.

That strategy has not produced a clean or practical resolution. It produced a paper victory, further costs, procedural satellite litigation, a discontinued challenge, a judicial review, and now a failed application for an extension of time.

In my view, Mr Corrigan was poorly served by a strategy that concentrated on forcing liability through the corporate structure without first solving the basic liquidation and recovery problems. The harder the strategy was pushed, the more expensive and convoluted the matter became.

What the 2026 judgment does and does not mean

The 2026 judgment means Mr Menzies was not permitted to restart his challenge substantially out of time. It confirms the obvious danger of discontinuing a proceeding when further evidence may later emerge. It also reflects the importance the Court places on finality and prompt resolution.

It does not establish that:

• the liquidator's account of excessive drawings was accurate;
• the financial material proved deliberate asset stripping;
• the disclosure process was complete;
• the liquidation was a sham;
• the phoenix-business narrative was correct;
• the original compliance order was necessarily the correct use of section 137; or
• the wider conflict between employment compliance powers and company liquidation law has been satisfactorily resolved.

Judge Holden recognised that the use of section 137 in this setting may need to be reconsidered alongside the statutory rules governing liquidation, director liability, and recovery of company debts. That is significant. It shows the underlying point was not nonsense, even though the late application failed.

Tristam Price's assessment

Tristam Price's media release describes the result as a failure on paper but says it would have been wrong not to try. I agree. Once the later material came to light, there was a legitimate public-interest reason to try to put the substantive issues back before a court.

The application was procedurally difficult and ultimately unsuccessful. But the attempt exposed the continuing gap between the formal result and the unresolved factual history underneath it.

Read Tristam Price's account: Leighton Associates - Media release: Menzies matter, Part 1 of 2.

My conclusion

This whole matter has been a procedural and evidential mess. The latest application failed because it was late. That was always the most immediate danger. But the failure does not make the underlying process satisfactory.

A company in liquidation was ordered to pay an employee. The employee apparently did not register the debt in the liquidation. The litigation then shifted towards making the director fund the company. Disputed accounting material and statements from a deeply problematic liquidation process were used to support that outcome. The challenge became financially impossible to maintain. Relevant information emerged too late. Then enormous energy was spent arguing about my language.

That is backwards.

Calling Daniel Church a moron may have been rude. It did not cause the liquidation problem, the accounting problem, the disclosure problem, the limited-liability problem, or the recovery problem. Concentrating on that language while failing to resolve the substance is precisely why I remain so critical of how this matter has been handled.

The real lesson is not simply that late challenges fail. It is that courts and representatives must identify the real problem early, test the evidence properly, understand the interaction between different statutory regimes, and stop allowing personal offence and procedural sideshows to consume the case.

Chronology of Anderson Law articles about Menzies v Corrigan

The following is the current chronological reading list of my articles dealing directly with the Menzies matter, the Catherine Stewart Barrister issues, the liquidator evidence, the Employment Court proceedings, and the related public commentary.

1. 27 August 2025 (updated 18 January 2026) - Menzies v Corrigan [2025] NZEmpC 186 - employment advocate and employment lawyer conduct. This explains the personal costs judgment, loss of practical limited-liability protection, the $33,000 stay condition, the attempted jail-sentence route, the non-party discovery dispute, and the later judicial review.
2. 6 February 2026 - Catherine Stewart Barrister - Daniel Church LinkedIn emails (context). This publishes the email context, explains why the "moron" comment was made, records the Registrar's procedural response, and lists the other procedural criticisms of the firm's handling.
3. 7 February 2026 - Employment Court hearing listed - Menzies judicial review (10 February 2026). This provides a neutral public-record chronology of the Authority determinations, stay decision, costs judgments, and the listed judicial review.
4. 11 May 2026 - Employment Court procedure: the problem is employment lawyer representative incompetence, not just advocates. This uses Menzies as a case study in wrong pleadings, sanctions by the wrong route, mishandled withdrawal, discovery, personal costs applications, and avoidable procedural expense.
5. 14 May 2026 - EMA's complaints about employment advocates are not a serious case for regulation. This broader regulation article asks why employer organisations criticising advocates did not assist when Menzies raised serious employer-side questions about company liability, compliance powers, and onerous stay conditions.
6. 15 May 2026 - EMA, Menzies v Corrigan, and the pull finger out intervention issue. This corrects the public reporting of "NZBA", explains that the intended organisation was the New Zealand Business Association, and sets out the context of seeking public-interest intervention.
7. 15 May 2026 - Poor accounting in the ERA: Menzies v Corrigan and the liquidator disclosure problem with Catherine Stewart Barrister. This is the detailed accounting and disclosure article: the "excessive drawings" allegation, the liquidator's disciplinary history, the documents routed through Ms Stewart's office, the reason for non-party discovery, and the disputed financial analysis.
8. 16 May 2026 - The public record on Joyce, Menzies, LawNews and RNZ. This consolidates the rebuttal to the public narrative, including the liquidator document pathway, accounting concerns, practical recovery problem, non-party discovery, media reporting, and Ms Stewart's personal involvement in the dispute.
9. 23 July 2026 - Menzies v Corrigan [2026] NZEmpC 151 - a procedural loss that still avoids the real issues. This article addresses the refusal of the late challenge, brings the whole history together, explains the discovery and jail-sentence issues, and records why the procedural loss does not resolve the underlying evidence or legal questions.

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Further reading: Leighton Associates - Menzies matter, Part 1 of 2.