A barrister for a class action against Radio Rentals has told the Federal Court the company’s “strange” lease contracts may have been worded solely to avoid its obligations under the Uniform Consumer Credit Code.
Mining giant BHP Billiton has reached a $50 million deal to settle the US class action over the 2015 dam failure at the Samarco mine in Brazil.
In a case that hinges on the evidence of expert witnesses, the judge overseeing the class action over the 2011 Queensland floods has partly upheld an objection to a revised report by the state of Queensland’s expert regarding an error in the flood-modelling by the plaintiff’s expert witness.
Former Slater & Gordon auditor Pitcher Partners has been hit with a class action alleging it signed off on an overly rosy 2015 year-end financial report that failed to disclose risks and impairments the firm faced from its recent acquisition of UK firm Quindell.
A judge has dismissed a bid by PriceWaterhouseCoopers to have one of two law firms bow out of a joint class action against the accounting giant after a lead applicant died.
BHP Billiton is facing the possibility of a second shareholder class action over the Fundao dam failure at its mine in Brazil, but the cases may be put on hold pending the outcome of homicide charges against company employees.
The country’s biggest law firms were among the first in line to weigh in on changes to the class action regime proposed by the Australian Law Reform Commission, with one global firm cautioning against a weakening of continuous disclosure laws.
Forcing courts to choose a single winner in the battle over competing class actions would exacerbate the problems of overlapping cases and encourage the race to court, class action powerhouse Maurice Blackburn said Wednesday.
The timing of an email from a Herbert Smith Freehills solicitor alerting the Fair Work Commission to union contempt proceedings, which the firm argued early this year was grounds for halting the amalgamation of the CFMEU with two other unions, points to ‘a high level of collusion’ to block the merger, a judge said Tuesday.
Lawyers for two competing class actions against the Commonwealth Bank of Australia over breaches of anti-money laundering laws say the cases can happily co-exist, but whether the court will agree may well depend on the outcome of a closely-watched appeal in a separate battle over multiple proceedings.