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Employment Law · Case Commentary

Stop Paying Him and He’ll Leave

What the Authority’s decision in Adams v EverEdge Global tells founders and boards about engineering an executive out the door.

Melt Strydom 10 August 2026 6 min read

The board had a simple idea: stop paying the chief executive, and he would take the hint and leave. No process, no protracted exit, no payout. It is an instinct that surfaces more often than anyone admits — usually at the moment a founder has become inconvenient to a larger deal. In Paul Adams v EverEdge Global Ltd, the Employment Relations Authority set out, patiently and expensively, why it does not work.

Paul Adams founded EverEdge in 2013. The firm advises companies on how to identify, protect, value, and commercialise intangible assets — patents, data, brands, and the like. He was its chief executive until May 2024. In September 2023, his family trust and his fellow director sold part of their shareholding to Meyzer360 Holdings, a Singaporean company controlled by Way Siong “Max” Goh. A term of that sale required Adams to stay on until at least 31 March 2026. Around the same time, with the company’s knowledge, he and his family relocated to Amsterdam, where he intended to keep running EverEdge and help drive its European expansion.

Then the share sale began to sour. Adams resigned from the board on 14 March 2024 — carefully, and in writing, as a director only, stating that he remained CEO on his existing terms. He was paid his salary for the last time the next day. On 29 March, the money simply did not arrive. It did not arrive on 12 April either, or on 26 April. Across three fortnightly pay cycles, Adams messaged the board and Goh repeatedly, asking why he had not been paid and warning — accurately — that withholding his salary breached both his employment agreement and the law. He received no substantive answer. On 1 May 2024, still unpaid, he resigned and brought a constructive dismissal claim.

The breach that founds a dismissal

Constructive dismissal has three settled categories in New Zealand. Adams relied on two of them, and the Authority found both made out.

The first is the fundamental breach. An employer is required to pay an employee for their work — it is close to the most basic obligation the relationship contains. EverEdge was bound to pay Adams under his employment agreement, and s 4 of the Wages Protection Act 1983 obliged it to pay the entire amount owing, without deduction, when the salary fell due. There was no suggestion the non-payment was an accident. As Member Craig put it, in the absence of any evidence of an accidental oversight, the only conclusion available was that EverEdge had decided to stop paying him and had chosen not to say so. Applying the two-step test, the resignation was caused by the total absence of pay over three paydays, and a breach of that seriousness made it entirely foreseeable that an employee would not keep working under those conditions. That alone was enough.

The second category is the course of conduct — behaviour, without proper cause, calculated or likely to destroy the relationship of trust and confidence. Here the evidence was worse for EverEdge than mere silence. Adams’ former colleague gave evidence that Goh had been furious after the board resignation, had threatened to fire Adams as CEO, and had instructed that his salary simply not be run. There was evidence that stopping pay to force a resignation was something of a house method at EverEdge — another person’s pay had been stopped, and the colleague giving evidence later had his own pay stopped too. The Authority accepted that the board’s real purpose was to pressure Adams over the share-sale negotiations, and that the quickest route to the exit it wanted, rather than a timely employment process, was to turn off the money. That is the definition of an engineered resignation, and the Authority named it as one.

A single darkened desk in an empty corporate office at night, a closed laptop and an unopened envelope lit by a low warm desk lamp.

Why the wrapper didn’t help

The most useful part of this determination, for any employer, is what happened to EverEdge’s explanations. It did not offer one reason for non-payment. It offered five, most of them raised for the first time at the investigation meeting: that Adams had actually resigned his employment back in March; that the board had decided to pay only junior staff; that he had moved to Amsterdam without approval; that he was not really working; and that he was, somehow, contract staff paid day to day. Several contradicted each other. Almost none was supported by a contemporaneous document — no payroll record, no email at the time saying any of this to Adams himself.

Craig treated that proliferation as evidence against EverEdge rather than for it. A single, coherent, documented reason, communicated to the employee at the time, is the mark of an employer acting in good faith. A pile of after-the-fact rationalisations reads as precisely what it was: a search for a justification to fit a decision already made for other reasons. The lesson is not subtle. If you find yourself assembling several explanations for the same act after the dispute has started, the problem is usually the act.

Nor did the deal dispute launder the breach. EverEdge plainly felt aggrieved about the share sale, about the relocation, and about an employment agreement Adams and his co-director had signed without passing it to the incoming owner. Some of that grievance may even have been reasonable. But the Authority’s focus stayed where it belonged — on the employment relationship. A shareholding dispute is one thing; the obligation to pay an employee his wages is another, and one cannot be used as leverage in the other. If EverEdge genuinely believed Adams had relocated without permission or stopped performing, the answer was to raise it, discuss it, and investigate it. It was not to stop paying him and wait for him to leave.

The arguments that failed

Two further moves are worth watching, because they are the ones a well-advised employer would reach for. EverEdge sought a 100 per cent reduction for contribution, and ran the non-disclosure of the 2024 agreement as subsequently discovered serious misconduct, relying on Salt v Fell. Both failed. On contribution, the two directors who signed the agreement were the entire board at the time, so the company could hardly say it was kept in the dark; and, decisively, there was no causal connection between that agreement and the decision to stop paying — Goh and Meyzer did not even know of it when they cut the money off. A contribution or misconduct argument needs a causal thread to the grievance. Throwing everything at the wall, and asking for a full reduction, is not a substitute for one.

What it cost

EverEdge was ordered to pay $40,625.01 in salary arrears, $182,812.55 in lost remuneration for the six months it took Adams to find work in a foreign market where he had no network, $30,000 in compensation for humiliation and injury to feelings, employer KiwiSaver contributions on top, and a $7,500 penalty for breach of good faith — a little over $267,000 in all, with costs still to be argued. The counterclaim EverEdge had lodged, alleging breaches of Adams’ duties, was withdrawn at the start of the hearing before a word of evidence was heard on it.

For founders, boards, and the private-equity and M&A world that increasingly sits behind them, this is the case to keep close. Executive exits entangled with a share sale are genuinely hard, and the temptation to solve an employment problem with a corporate lever is real. But the wages obligation does not bend to the deal. If you are managing a founder or executive out during a change of control, the process still has to be a process — raised, documented, and paid for — because the alternative is not a quiet resignation. It is a determination with your name on it.

If you are heading into an exit like this and want the sequence mapped before anyone touches the payroll, that is exactly the kind of conversation worth having early.

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Lex Praxis advises New Zealand employers on employment law, including dismissal process, executive exits, and restructures. This article is general commentary and does not constitute legal advice. For advice specific to your circumstances, contact us directly.

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