Regulators

Courtenay House director Tony Iervasi has been sentenced to 11 years’ imprisonment after pleading guilty to charges connected to a $180 million Ponzi scheme that duped hundreds of investors.

The government has revealed the thresholds for mergers that will need to be reviewed by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission under reforms that will take effect in 2026, promising to spare small acquisitions.

ASIC has won its bid to appoint receivers to a managed investment scheme run by Keystone Asset Management after expressing “grave concerns” that investor funds were used to pay sports stars and buy a $4.3 million home for its former director.

A former financial advisor at the now-defunct Growth Plus Financial Group has been convicted on 28 counts of fraud and jailed for 12 years for defrauding clients of $6 million, in conduct a judge described as “evil” and “systematic”.

BlueScope Steel is seeking to overturn a record $57.5 million penalty for engaging in attempted price-fixing with flat steel distributors, telling an appeals court that it was simply trying to make its competitors understand “it was in their interests to price differently”. 

A three-day penalty hearing in action against payday lenders BSF Solutions and Cigno — in which ASIC is seeking a multi-million dollar fine — has been put on ice until after a challenge to a finding that they were unlicensed credit providers.

The OAIC will not investigate Clearview AI further after finding in 2021 that the US-based facial recognition software company breached privacy rules by scraping facial images from the web, but the regulator promised to weigh in soon on when the use of personal information to train AI could run afoul of privacy laws.

An ANZ employee has lost her application in the Fair Work Commission to work from home full time on the basis that she is over 55 years old, with a commissioner saying there was no “rational connection” between her age and the request. 

The corporate regulator has won its case against Bit Trade, the Australian provider of the Kraken crypto exchange, after a judge rejected the company’s argument that its product was not a credit facility. 

The CDPP has complained about being brought back to court “again and again” to deal with Clive Palmer’s complaints about a compulsory examination by ASIC, as the corporate regulator seeks to have his case challenging the lawfulness of the seven year-old examination thrown out as an abuse of process.