A Melbourne law firm and barrister will soon face trial over allegations of breach of fiduciary duty brought by a former client who lost a lawsuit over a $24.5 million property joint venture.
The founder of a charity that provides sleeping bags to homeless people has lost her unfair dismissal case after she went “to war” with the non-profit in the Fair Work Commission following a string of fraud charges levelled against her.
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.
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.
The son of Banksia Securities class action funder Mark Elliott questioned his father on whether it was “right” to rip up a $64 million settlement with the collapsed lender’s trustee if the deal didn’t guarantee him a $12.8 million commission, a court has heard.
An employment partner at Norton Rose Fulbright has defended his destruction of notes following an internal investigation into allegations of bullying at the law firm, telling a Federal Circuit Court judge that this was “standard practice”.
Lawyer Alex Elliott has told a judge he didn’t know when he postdated cheques for members of the Banksia class action legal team that it was done to mislead the appeals court in the case, but has admitted that in hindsight “it doesn’t look good”.
An employment partner with Norton Rose Fulbright, who has been referred by a judge to the legal watchdog for possible professional misconduct in a case by a former colleague, is under scrutiny in a second Fair Work suit, this time for allegedly destroying evidence.
The mastermind behind an alleged fraudulent scheme by members of the legal team running the class action over the collapse of Banksia Securities was a “brilliant operator”, his son has told a court.