The files he gathered to prove underpayment became the case Ventia built against him
A worker who said his employer shorted him nearly $100,000 lost his case - and a court told him to hand over his devices.
The Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia has thrown out an underpayment claim brought by a former operations manager against Ventia, the maintenance and services group listed on the Australian and New Zealand stock exchanges. The ruling, delivered on June 26, 2026, in Adelaide, is a clean illustration of how annualized salary contracts hold up against overtime claims - and a cautionary note on what a departing employee can do with company files.
The man had worked for Ventia until August 2025, most recently under a fixed-term contract paying a total fixed remuneration of $150,000 a year plus a company car. After leaving, he sued under the Fair Work Act. He said he regularly worked 50 to 60 hours a week and was owed overtime, unpaid annual leave, a living-away-from-home allowance and an on-call allowance - about $100,000 all up. He also wanted Ventia penalized for allegedly failing to keep proper employment records.
Ventia's answer was blunt. The contract set his hours at 38 a week "plus any reasonable additional hours," and his salary already covered the extra time. Read that way, the National Employment Standards - the baseline entitlements every employee gets - added nothing, because his actual pay sat above the theoretical minimum.
The court sided with the company. Accepting Ventia's reading of the contract, the judge held it was "the only logical and objectively reasonable interpretation," and that a clause excluding company policies ruled out the allowances he was chasing. That other staff sometimes received those allowances made no difference. The upshot: he had "no reasonable prospects" of success, the threshold for summary dismissal, and the claim was cut off before trial.
There's a helpful record-keeping point here too. The court accepted that the rules exist to make sure wages can be verified and correctly paid - not to track every trip or vehicle movement. Since he had no right to overtime or allowances, Ventia had no duty to keep records of them.
Then the case took an unusual turn. To rebuild his hours, the worker had held onto thousands of company records he downloaded while employed - travel bookings, vehicle logs, building-access data, emails, expense files - and bolted many of them to his affidavits. Ventia said the material was its confidential property, that he was contractually required to return it, and that keeping it breached its IT policy. It had asked him to identify and delete the documents; he refused.
The court found Ventia had a prima facie - meaning arguable, not yet proven - case for breach of confidence. It made a set of interim orders: the worker must stop using or copying the material, must preserve it, and must produce his electronic devices to the court so an independent computer expert can take forensic copies and trace what was shared and with whom. Ventia was also granted leave to bring a cross-claim, including under a Corporations Act provision barring employees from improperly using information gained on the job.
On costs, he was spared. Orders requiring workers to pay costs are uncommon under the Fair Work Act, and the judge declined to make one, pointing to the gap between a self-represented individual and a listed company. He was careful to add that it was not his role to decide whether Ventia had exploited anyone.
For HR leaders, the lessons are practical. A tightly drafted annualized contract - ordinary hours, reasonable extra hours, policies expressly excluded - can carry the day when overtime and allowance claims arrive. And offboarding is its own compliance exposure: the case shows how much data an employee can walk away with, and how far an employer may have to go through the courts to get it back.
