Retail

A former Mastercard business development director has admitted at trial to lying to the payments giant's finance department about the risk of 7-Eleven routing transactions to EFTPOS to seal a deal.

Trial in a case alleging Mastercard misused its market power by striking deals with retailers to defend revenues against EFTPOS routing has heard external competition lawyers suggested removing the word 'routing' from its contract with Woolworths.

Mastercard risked losing half its revenue from retail interchange fees as a result of the Reserve Bank's least-cost routing initiative, and struck deals with top retailers to defend its core business, a court was told Wednesday.

A trial judge has heard that Mastercard's top Australian executives discussed stripping Woolworths of strategic merchant status if the supermarket giant routed customer transactions through the cheaper EFTPOS network.

ASIC has opened an insider trading investigation into the trading of retailer Accent Group's shares, asking the company to preserve communications by its CEO Daniel Agostinelli.

A judge has again voiced doubts about the ACCC's misleading conduct case over Woolworths' 'Prices Dropped' campaign, probing counsel for the regulator at length on Thursday about how the claims stack up.

Coles, Woolworths, McDonald's and Hungry Jack's have denied underpaying employees in class actions over Sunday pay entitlements in South Australia, saying that if workers were underpaid, they can set off any amounts owed against mistaken overpayments.

Mastercard's APAC head was "perfectly comfortable" with the threat of removal of discounted interchange rates to cut a deal with Coles to route transactions through its payment network, a court has heard.

A judge has hit mattress retailer Emma Sleep with a $15 million penalty after it admitted to repeatedly misleading consumers about discounts, saying the ACCC's proposed $36 million was not needed to achieve deterrence.

Was inflation at work, or deception, when Woolworths' advertised the Oreo Family Pack as a 'Prices Dropped' special of $4.50 in December 2022, when the biscuits had been selling for $3.50 just three weeks earlier?