The former CEO of failed electronics retailer Dick Smith should be held responsible for approving two dividend payments worth $28.5 million which the company could not afford to pay given it owed millions in unpaid bank loans and supplier debts, an appeals court has heard.
Max Twigg, race car driver and former owner of the famous Byron Bay Hotel, has lost an appeal of a judge’s finding that he misappropriated around $100 million in family trust money and took steps to conceal the transfer of funds from his mother.
A judge has signed off on a $125 million settlement to resolve a shareholder class action against Crown Resorts over disclosures relating to its Chinese gambling operations, but has shaved $1 million from the funder’s proposed commission.
Two psychiatrists who administered the controversial deep sleep therapy at the Chelmsford Private Hospital in the 1970s have won a Full Federal Court appeal in their defamation cases against publisher HarperCollins, with one of the cases being sent back for a re-trial.
US institutional shareholders who joined a class action against Crown Resorts that settled on the eve of trial for $125 million are urging the Federal Court to slash the funder’s commission by $4.65 million.
Former attorney-general Christian Porter has told the Full Court that silk Sue Chrysanthou had to act for him in his defamation action against the ABC over an article airing historical rape allegations, saying she could not refuse the brief simply because a friend of his rape accuser “wishes him ill”.
The High Court has reinstated a $435,000 judgment awarded to a former lawyer who suffered post-traumatic stress disorder while working for the Special Sexual Offences unit in Victoria’s Office of Public Prosecutions.
The High Court has rejected a special leave application by consumer goods giant Reckitt-Benckiser in its long-running battle with the maker of painkiller Maxigesic.
The ATO has won a legal challenge over when it can claim tax from trust income, with the High Court finding beneficiaries cannot “retrospectively expunge” their entitlements to the proceeds of a trust despite the potential “unfairness” this creates.
An additional 1,200 women who were implanted with defective pelvic mesh devices will be eligible for compensation after Johnson & Johnson unit Ethicon agreed that findings in an earlier class action which it unsuccessfully fought all the way to the High Court should apply to a follow-on class action.