Judges

The corporate regulator has secrued orders barring fintech giant PayPal from enforcing a term in its contracts with small businesses that set a two-month deadline for complaints about excess fees.

A group member in a class action against Johnson & Johnson unit DePuy International has lost his bid to challenge his compensation determination 12 years after the case settled, with a judge finding that the independent counsel conducting the determination was not bound by the rules of procedural fairness.   

In a contest to run a class action against International Capital Markets over risky derivative products, a proposed consolidated proceeding has taken aim at third-to-file Banton Group for allegedly copying its case. 

Santos has largely succeeded in its bid for documents from the Environmental Defenders Office and expert witnesses in a failed case challenging the construction of the oil and gas company’s $5.6 billion Barossa pipeline.

Industrial technology company Delta Building Automation has appealed a $1.5 million penalty for attempting to rig a bid for construction work on the National Gallery of Australia, a penalty five times the amount it claimed it should face.

PricewaterhouseCoopers has agreed to pay $8.25 million to settle a class action on behalf of Axsesstoday bondholders over an allegedly misleading bond prospectus, bringing the settlement total to $9.5 million after a group of insurers agreed to pay $1 million to settle the class action’s claims.

The Federal Court must guard against “exceptions by accretion” when weighing Westpac’s application to prevent the public from accessing documents filed in a lawsuit by the bank’s former head of strategy, which has resolved in a confidential settlement, a judge heard Wednesday.

Google has slammed Fortnite game maker Epic Games’ landmark competition case against it as “contrary to commercial reality”, saying its competition with rival tech giant Apple means it is no monopolist.

The Australian provider of the Kraken crypto exchange has told a court that its margin trading product is not a credit facility, rejecting the corporate regulator’s “overly broad” definition of the word ‘credit’. 

Despite arguing for suppression as a means only to successful mediation, Westpac now wants a settled employment case brought by an executive kept under lock and key. And in a worrying sign the Federal Court may have lost sight of the importance of open justice, a judge has indicated she would entertain an order that the suit never see the light of day.