Maurice Blackburn has partly prevailed in an appeal of a judge’s decision to put the brakes on its shareholder class action against BHP while greenlighting a competing case brought by Phi Finney McDonald, with an appeals court ordering the rival law firms to negotiate a deal to consolidate their litigation.
Maurice Blackburn’s funding model rejected by a judge overseeing a beauty parade of class actions against BHP appeared structured to incentivise the firm to push up its legal fees, an appeals court said Monday on the first day of a high stakes hearing challenging a decision to shut down two of three competing cases against the mining giant.
An appeals court has slashed a damages judgment against international banknote manufacturer CCL Secure in a case alleging it tricked its Nigerian agent into signing away his commission, cutting the award from $65 million to $1.8 million.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has come up short in its appeal of a ruling that found it had produced insufficient evidence of a laundry detergent cartel, in the first so-called hub and spoke case brought by the competition regulator.
Crown Resorts has appealed a ruling in a shareholder class action against it allowing 18 former employees, who were jailed as part of the Chinese government’s crackdown on gambling, to answer questions about its business in China.
The High Court will not review an appeals court’s decision to approve a $64 million settlement in litigation over the failure of Banksia Securities while rejecting the funder’s commission and legal fees.
The High Court has granted ASIC special leave to appeal a judgment that let a former director of Gold Coast finance company MFS Group partially off the hook for $147.5 million in misappropriated funds, after ASIC argued the High Court should intervene to clarify the scope of the word “officer” under the Corporations Act.
The High Court has agreed to take up an appeal by mining giant BHP Group Limited in its battle with the Australian Tax Office over an $82M tax bill.
The writing may be on the wall for common fund orders in class actions that put all unregistered group members on the hook for a litigation funder’s commission, after the High Court agreed Wednesday to take up landmark challenges by Westpac and BMW, experts say.
The High Court has upheld an appeal by a mortgage broker with a history of run-ins with the law, finding that the Administrative Appeals Tribunal could not take spent convictions into account when reviewing ASIC ban orders.