A senior ACCC officer has been grilled on whether staff training on criminal cartel investigations was “inadequate” while the competition regulator ran a cartel probe into ANZ’s $2.5 billion share placement in 2016.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has launched proceedings against online book retailer Booktopia for allegedly making false or misleading statements about consumers’ rights to refunds for faulty books.
The Australia and New Zealand Banking Group has agreed to pay a $25 million penalty to resolve proceedings by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission alleging the bank short-changed hundreds of thousands of customers to the tune of $200 million.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission has opposed BlueScope Steel general manager Jason Ellis’ request for court permission to manage another company, saying he should wait until the ACCC’s price-fixing case against him has been decided.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission will not oppose the $23.6 billion takeover of Sydney Airport by an international consortium of investors, finding further consolidation is unlikely to lessen competition in a market which is already a “natural monopoly”.
The Port of Newcastle has largely won its High Court fight with mining giant Glencore over access fees and will now be able to set a higher price for use of the port’s facilities.
A judge was “mistaken” to find that AFT Pharmaceuticals’ ads for its painkiller Maxigesic were misleading, with the Full Federal Court ruling there was an adequate scientific foundation for the ads’ claims that the drug provided faster, better pain relief than paracetamol and ibuprofen alone.
Mercedes-Benz has responded to a $650 million lawsuit by Australian dealers over its decision to move to a fixed-price agency model, saying it had a “legitimate commercial interest” in making the change and denying that dealer agreements were “perpetual” in their terms.
Sydney-based plastic surgeon Daniel Lanzer is facing a potential class action lawsuit in the wake of a damning Four Corners investigation which accused him of “gruesome” and “barbaric” practices.
A judge has ruled he will not consider a separate question on whether Acciona is barred from setting off any damages payable to Lendlease in a lawsuit over the $160 million sale of its engineering business.