Judge Seals Records in Ex-Armor All Worker’s Suit : Courts: Former employee who alleges wrongful termination suffers setback. He’ll be prevented from revealing what the Aliso Viejo car-product company calls trade secrets.

A Superior Court judge, dealing a blow to a former Armor All Products Corp. employee, sealed the records Tuesday in the worker’s wrongful-termination case and ordered him to pay $6,215 of the company’s legal fees and to return to it tires and documents he took.

Judge Paul M. Bryant Jr., siding with the Aliso Viejo maker of car-care products, halted former Armor All research manager Pritam S. Dhaliwal from using his lawsuit to reveal what the company considers to be trade secrets.

Dhaliwal accused the company in his San Bernardino Superior Court lawsuit, filed in November, of covering up internal findings suggesting that the company’s products, including its leading Armor All Protectant product, cause tires and air bag covers to weaken and crack.

Last month, the company sought to seal confidential documents in the court case and obtain sanctions against Dhaliwal for violating a confidentiality agreement he had with the company. It also requested a return of documents and material in Dhaliwal’s possession.

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Bryant on Tuesday ordered that “the entire court file in this case shall be kept under seal, and any material filed in this case shall be filed under seal.” He also ordered Dhaliwal to return about 500 pages of Armor All documents and about 25 tires that Dhaliwal said the company had ordered him to destroy.

“Today, Armor All got everything they wanted. They can cloak this case in secrecy from now on,” said John C. McCarthy of Claremont, Dhaliwal’s attorney. “Anything Armor All doesn’t want you to know, you aren’t going to know.”

Armor All hailed the judge’s move, contending that he was preserving valuable company trade secrets.

“We got what we asked for,” said William Bottger of Los Angeles, the company’s attorney. “We have nothing to conceal here, we just don’t want our confidential trade secrets getting to our competitors.”

With a doctorate in chemistry, Dhaliwal, 54, joined Armor All in 1992 to manage the research laboratory.

In his lawsuit, Dhaliwal said he found in tests that he and others performed that Armor All Protectant caused tire walls and vinyl surfaces in cars to break down and crack more rapidly than they would without treatments. In addition, he said, Armor All Tire Foam could reduce braking power by weakening treads of worn or used tires.

In his complaint, Dhaliwal accused the company of continuing to sell the products despite his warnings. He was dismissed in February, 1994, when Armor All switched its research testing to an outside laboratory.

While he contends that he was wrongly fired, the company said he was fired for “performance reasons.” His wrongful-termination lawsuit is still before the court.

Armor All, with sales of $217 million and earnings of $24.5 million last year, is a publicly traded company that is 57%-owned by McKesson Corp. in San Francisco.