A judge overseeing a landmark competition case against Apple and Google has questioned whether Apple’s US lawyers wrongly used court submissions in Australia to put pressure on Epic Games in Europe and justify temporarily removing its developer account.
Google offered Fortnite creator Epic Games $200 million and proposed to acquire equity in the company to prevent it from opening its own app store with exclusive content that could compete with the search giant’s Play Store, a court has heard.
Google is nearing “monopoly levels” with its exploitation of the Android brand to prevent other app stores from competing with its Play Store, the maker of the Fortnite video game has said in a landmark competition trial.
Apple has made exceptional profits skimming a 30 per cent commission from sales on its app store, dubbed by the tech giant’s CEO an “economic miracle”, Epic Games has said on the first day of trial in a landmark competition case.
An Australian court will get a chance to weigh in on whether Apple and Google violated their dominant position in the app marketplace by requiring developers to use their payment systems or face a 30 per cent fee, when trial kicks off Monday in Fortnite game maker Epic Games’ case and two related class actions against the tech giants.
Philanthropist and Wotif founder Graeme Wood will have to pay more than $15 million after the Victoria Supreme Court found one of his companies had breached an agreement to act as guarantor for the $73 million sale of a Queensland aquaculture business.
Payouts in class actions in 2020 largely kept pace with the previous year despite the financial strain of the COVID-19 pandemic, with companies and other defendants paying more than $696 million to settle class actions last year.
A judge has signed off on a $32.4 million settlement in a shareholder class action against engineering services firm CIMIC, including a hefty legal bill for the firm that brought the case.
Engineering services company CIMIC will fork over $32.4 million to settle a shareholder class action, with group members expected to get 40 per cent of the settlement total if the court approves the requested legal costs and funder’s commission.
Engineering services company CIMIC has agreed to settle a long-running shareholder class action launched in the wake of media reports of an alleged $42 million bribe paid by the firm to win a lucrative oil contract.