Kate Morgan

A judge has approved $32 million in penalties against Westpac in two cases brought by the corporate regulator accusing the bank of misleading thousands of “vulnerable” customers about their debts and failing to manage the accounts of deregistered companies.

The maker of the popular Invisalign dental aligners may soon face a cross-claim from competitor SmileDirectClub, which it sued for allegedly misleading consumers about the cost and efficacy of its direct-to-consumer teeth alignment kits. 

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.

The CDPP’s decision to drop all criminal cartel charges against two banks and four individuals in a “test case” over a $2.5 billion ANZ share placement shows the ACCC “lacks expertise and objectivity” on the financial markets and should leave them to ASIC to regulate, according to one of the former accused.

In a stunning reversal, the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecution has dropped all criminal cartel charges against two investment banks and four individuals in relation to a $2.5 billion ANZ share placement, four years after the charges were brought following an allegedly questionable investigation by the ACCC.

A Sydney-based barrister has been reprimanded for relying on his “gut feeling” in making baseless accusations of misconduct against the principal of a law firm.

A senior ACCC officer has been grilled on whether staff training on criminal cartel investigations was “inadequate” while the competition regulator ran a cartel probe into ANZ’s $2.5 billion share placement in 2016.

The ACCC has been accused of running a “experimental test case” that tries to fit the shares market within the scope of the Competition and Consumer Act with its criminal cartel case against Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and several prominent banking executives over a $2.5 billion ANZ share placement.

Collapsed NSW training company Australian Institute of Professional Education has been slugged with a $153 million penalty, the highest ever fine in a consumer law case, after the Federal Court found the school targeted vulnerable students through an “unconscionable” enrolment system.

JPMorgan Australia chairman Rob Priestley told Citigroup and Deutsche Bank executives not to “panic” about picking up a shortfall in the sale of ANZ shares, a court has heard in the ACCC’s criminal cartel case over a $2.5 billion ANZ share placement.