Barristers

A court has tossed a conviction secured in ASIC’s case against a director of collapsed flight booking platform Fly365, saying the case was “doomed to failure.”

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission has dragged lender Money3 to court for allegedly failing to properly assess the creditworthiness of low-income individuals before saddling them with $11,000 loans for second-hand car purchases.

An appeals court has found a seven-year non-competition clause in US tech giant DXC Eclipse’s agreement with the former director of Melbourne software firm Sable37, which it acquired in 2018, was unreasonable.

A clash between a class action applicant and a litigation funder over $1.2 million in claimed expenses has settled, after a judge ordered the sides to personally attend mediation.

Customers of wealth manager Colonial First State were $10 million to $12 million better off without a litigation funder in a class action over the slow transfer of accounts to low cost MySuper funds, a judge has found.

The company behind the Ultimate Fighting Championship gym franchise has been ordered to pay $5 million to three franchisees after a judge found it misled them about businesses which were “near valueless” and unlikely to make profit. 

Former Army major Heston Russell has panned the ABC’s argument that it is not liable to pay damages in his defamation case because he identified himself and was given an opportunity to respond to stories that suggested he was involved in murdering an Afghan prisoner.

Texas oil giant Tri-Star has lost its bid for a referral in a dispute with natural gas exporter Australia Pacific LNG over several coal seam gas fields in Queensland and $7.6 billion in share acquisitions.

A fed-up judge has vented his frustration with the problem of competing class actions in a move that appears to punish the second filed case against Medibank. But is he right that the courts are increasingly being asked to deal with duplicative proceedings? And was his order really all that drastic?

One of the two remaining class actions against the Department of Defence over the use of alleged toxic firefighting foam at military bases across the country has settled for $132.7 million on the eve of trial, with the final case going back to mediation.