The founder of embattled investment group Mayfair 101, James Mawhinney, has said he received legal advice approving the company’s advertising of financial products that a court has found misled investors.
Logistics company GetSwift’s settlement of a shareholder class action will see group members share in $1.5 million cash plus access to further funds and revenue raised by the company over a three-year period.
Personal lender ClearLoans has lost its bid to strike out claims in ASIC’s first case related to the COVID-19 pandemic after a judge found the regulator’s action, which accuses the lender of breaching the hardship provisions of the credit laws, was “sufficiently clear”.
New requirements that funded class actions be run as managed investment schemes will throw up myriad new questions for the courts, with lawyers predicting novel challenges by defendants and group members and an altered landscape for competing class actions.
Recent changes to the law requiring funded class actions to be registered as managed investment schemes have complicated the question of how best to resolve the multiplicity issue in two class actions brought against Freedom Foods and Deloitte.
The Commonwealth Bank will plead guilty to criminal charges following an ASIC investigation over misleading representations to customers who purchased add-on consumer credit insurance.
The former lead auditor of stockbroker Halifax Investment Services, whose 2018 collapse resulted in $200 million in investor losses, has had his registration cancelled following an application by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.
Members Equity Bank faces a potential multi-million dollar fine if it is found guilty of misleading home loan customers in the first criminal prosecution under the consumer protection provision of the ASIC Act to be tried in the Federal Court.
Clive Palmer’s Mineralogy has appealed a ruling tossing a lawsuit it brought against ASIC, which a judge called an “ill-disguised collateral attack” on the regulator for criminal proceedings against the billionaire mining magnate over $12 million in payments made to his political party in 2013.
An award-winning Gold Coast solicitor and four directors of the Members Alliance and Benchmark group of companies have been charged in connection with the collapse of the property investment group in 2016.