A judge has signalled his intention to sign off on a $138 million settlement in a class action against IAG and approve a common fund order that gives the litigation funder a $34.5 million commission, but an application by the funder for reimbursement of after-the-event insurance has been refused.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has taken franchise giant Retail Food Group to court for allegedly misleading purchasers of loss-making franchises about the profitability or viability of its stores.
The Federal Court judge who is now overseeing a high stakes criminal cartel case against several investment banks and individuals over a $2.5 billion ANZ share placement has ordered that an indictment be filed by February 1, telling the parties “we have to get this case moving” and that he hoped to move the matter to trial “before we all retire”.
The son of the funder behind a class action at the centre of scandalous misconduct claims says he would have sought advice from a family friend if he had realised his father and counsel leading the case were misleading the court to inflate their profits from a $64 million settlement.
Women’s fashion designer Pinnacle Runway has cut its losses and dropped its challenge to a ruling that found a rival’s use of the name ‘Delphine’ to describe a bikini style did not constitute trade mark infringement, after a judge hit the company with indemnity costs for pursuing the ‘ill-advised’ lawsuit.
A judge has allowed documents obtained from examination proceedings against directors of Linchpin Capital to be used in a class action against the failed financial services group.
Solicitor Alex Elliott has said it never clicked with him that members of the legal team running the Banksia class action were misleading an appeals court when his father — the mastermind behind the alleged deception — told him to sign cheques for lawyers that they could not cash.
The funder accused of a fraudulent scheme to pocket inflated fees from the Banksia Securities class action produced less than 200 documents to the contradictor in the case and invented a story about a routine email purging practice to explain the discovery hole, a court has heard.
Three banks have been committed to stand trial after pleading not guilty to criminal charges stemming from an alleged cartel agreement reached in a $2.5 billion ANZ share placement, with the closely watched case now moving to the Federal Court two-and-a-half years after it was filed.
The columnist behind two allegedly defamatory Australian Financial Review articles has told the court that he believed former Blue Sky managing director Dr Elaine Stead was “cretinously stupid” because of her “astonishingly ridiculous” behavior on social media at the time of the company’s collapse.