An NSW Personal Injury Commission ruling in Tiwari v AAI Limited t/as GIO [2026] NSWPIC 251 offers CTP insurers a useful reference point on claimant credibility, vocational evidence, and reading a career story past its cover.
The decision in Tiwari v AAI Limited t/as GIO, handed down on May 4, 2026, awarded a total of $811,658.10 to Siddharth Tiwari following a head-on collision on Pennant Hills Road in Carlingford on January 1, 2019. Liability had been admitted by AAI Limited, trading as GIO, so the only fight was over the size of the cheque.
Tiwari's injuries were serious. The collision left him with a splenic laceration, mesenteric tears, and a subsequent small bowel resection, alongside persistent post-traumatic stress disorder, lower back pain, and an iron deficiency anaemia traced to ulceration at the surgical site. The real contest, though, played out in two arenas familiar to every claims handler - what the claimant told his doctors, and how high his career might have climbed if the crash had never happened.
The credibility problem
Between October 2023 and March 2024, Tiwari held down two full-time jobs at once, one at TPG Telecom and another at Toyota Finance. He didn't mention this to the medical assessors or the medico-legal experts evaluating his capacity to work - all while telling them he was struggling to cope with a single role.
Member Bianca Montgomery-Hribar accepted he may not have intended to mislead, but found the omission may have influenced the accuracy of the medical opinions. Reports prepared without the full picture were treated with caution. Notably, a supplementary report from Dr Uthum Dias - written after the dual employment came to light - was given more weight than his earlier opinion. For insurers, it's a reminder that revisiting medico-legal opinions when new facts surface can shift the evidentiary landscape.
The redundancy that wasn't what he said it was
Tiwari claimed two post-accident redundancies, from Permaconn in 2021 and Vocus in 2023, were really performance dismissals caused by his injuries. The Member wasn't buying it. At Vocus, he had received "flying high" performance ratings in both FY22 and FY23, a $20,000 pay rise in July 2022, and was offered an alternative role within the company and seconded into a business analyst role before resigning the day after a medical assessor's examination, having accepted a role with TPG Telecom. The contemporaneous paper trail simply didn't match his account.
It's a useful reference for insurers facing economic loss claims dressed up as accident-related career decline.
The career trajectory that didn't fly
Tiwari's vocational expert, Danny Sidhwa, charted a path that ultimately reached Chief Strategy Officer. The insurer's expert, Jonathan Foxley, called it "idealised." The Member sided with Foxley, pointing to factual errors in Sidhwa's report, including an overstated tenure as a senior consultant and a mischaracterisation of Tiwari's PwC role as strategy consulting. Drawing on the Morgan McKinley Australian Salary Guide, Foxley placed Tiwari's likely ceiling in mid-level commercial, transformation, or business improvement roles.
The numbers
The final award in Tiwari v AAI Limited t/as GIO broke down as $400,000 for non-economic loss, $19,695.10 for past economic loss, $14,963 for Fox v Wood, and a $377,000 buffer for future economic loss.
