The contractual clauses that handed his ex-employer the win
A Western Australian court has granted permanent injunctions against a former senior contracts specialist who spent more than a year posting his ex-employer's confidential emails on LinkedIn.
In a decision delivered on 29 April 2026, the Supreme Court of Western Australia ruled in favour of Tronox Management Pty Ltd, a company incorporated in Western Australia which conducts operations for the mining and processing of mineral sands at sites to the north of Perth, and manufactures titanium dioxide pigment at its Kwinana Pigment Plant. The company is part of the US-listed Tronox Holdings plc group.
The worker was initially employed by Tronox from 27 November 2020 in the role of Contracts Specialist, and later promoted to Senior Contracts Specialist – Energy & Compliance. His employment was terminated on 15 August 2024. Following the termination, he made several work-related claims against Tronox including a worker's compensation claim in the WorkCover WA jurisdiction and an unfair dismissal claim in the Fair Work Commission.
But things escalated well beyond the usual post-termination disputes.
While still employed, the specialist had been forwarding internal Tronox emails to his personal Gmail and iiNet addresses. A forensic review was conducted by Mr Jon Seet, an Infrastructure Architect employed by the plaintiff, who reviewed the sites and mailboxes held by the plaintiff using a Microsoft program referred to as 'Microsoft Purview'. Mr Seet found that between 1 January 2024 and 14 April 2024, the defendant 'had a practice' of sending documents and information from his work email address to his private email addresses. The scope of the review was later extended to include the period from 1 January 2023 to 31 December 2023. On the basis of that review, between 1 January 2024 and 15 August 2024, the defendant sent around 19 emails from his work email address to his personal email addresses, which attached emails or documents, most of which were the property of the plaintiff.
Then came the LinkedIn posts. Between 4 November 2024 and 22 December 2025, the specialist published a series of posts on his LinkedIn account containing internal Tronox emails, supplier contract details, KPIs, meeting minutes with long-term suppliers, and emails about personnel matters. In April 2025, posts published to his LinkedIn profile included "derogatory commentary" about Tronox employees.
Tronox's lawyers wrote to him in November 2024 demanding he stop. He did not. A WorkCover arbitrator ordered him on 30 June 2025 to remove from LinkedIn any and all posts disclosing or referring to materials filed in those proceedings. He kept posting anyway. The arbitrator later reminded him that failure to comply with a decision of a dispute resolution authority is a criminal offence with a maximum penalty of $15,000.
Earlier, on 13 January 2026, Tronox had obtained urgent ex parte interlocutory injunctive relief from Justice Cobby in the Supreme Court before bringing the substantive proceedings.
The specialist, who represented himself throughout, raised a string of defences. He argued he was a whistleblower protected under the Public Interest Disclosure Act 2003 (WA) and the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth). He claimed the documents formed part of his employee record under the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth). He invoked the moral rights clause in his employment contract. He alleged the documents were already public because he had filed them in other proceedings.
He also applied twice for the judge to recuse himself, including on the basis of Justice Lundberg's Indigenous Wajarri Yamaji heritage and a court associate's previous employment at a Perth law firm. The first recusal application had already been dismissed on 5 March 2026.
Justice Lundberg rejected each argument. On the whistleblower point, he found the LinkedIn platform is a social media platform, and the disclosures made by the defendant were thus not to a 'journalist' as defined. On employee records, he accepted Tronox's submission that an 'employee record' does not extend to all internal emails which were sent or received by the employee in the course of the employee's employment.
The judge found the specialist had breached three clauses of his employment contract: the obligation to return company property on termination (cl 15.4), the duty to maintain the secrecy of confidential information (cl 18.3.1), and the duty to assist the employer in relation to threatened proceedings about unauthorised disclosure (cl 18.3.3).
Justice Lundberg said the specialist's conduct of disclosing the information on a public-facing internet account was "antithetical to the contractual obligation to which he agreed".
The court granted summary judgment in Tronox's favour and made permanent orders requiring the specialist to deliver up hard copies of company property, allow a Tronox-nominated computer expert to examine and delete company information from his electronic devices, remove the LinkedIn content, and verify his compliance by affidavit. He was permanently restrained from publishing Tronox's confidential information or court documents from the proceedings. Tronox indicated that, in the event the summary judgment application succeeds, it would not press the balance of its claims against the defendant, including the claim for damages and compensation, and would discontinue the rest of the proceedings - claims that included conversion, breach of confidence, breach of section 183 of the Corporations Act, and injurious falsehood.
The ruling is a useful reminder that confidentiality clauses in employment contracts can extend well beyond what equity alone would protect, and a clear contractual definition of confidential information was central to Tronox's win. Forensic email tracing through tools like Microsoft Purview proved decisive in establishing the paper trail. And the ruling makes clear that posting on LinkedIn will not, on its own, attract whistleblower protection under either Western Australian or Commonwealth law.
