In this article, we derive the asymptotic distribution of residual autocovariance and autocorrelation matrices for a general class of multivariate nonlinear time series models assuming only that the error term is a martingale difference sequence. Two types of applications are developed: global test statistics of the portmanteau type and one-lag test statistics, which describe the residual correlation at individual lags. To illustrate the proposed methodology, simulation results are reported for diagnosing multivariate threshold time series models. The following test statistics are compared: the classical test statistics presuming independent errors and the proposed methodology which supposes only martingale difference errors.