In a loss for the Australian Taxation Office, the Full Federal Court has found that payments made by Asahi Breweries-owned Schweppes to PepsiCo under agreements to sell brands such as Pepsi and Mountain Dew in Australia were not subject to a royalty withholding tax.
A judge has expressed concern about the Australian Securities and Investments Commission’s suspicion that a former director of Keystone Asset Management may have used investor funds to purchase a house in his wife’s name, calling it “alarming”.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority says a coding error on a dormant website that went undetected for four years was behind a massive data breach that exposed the information of close to 10 million Optus customers, with the regulator saying the hack was “not highly sophisticated”.
The federal government has backed suggestions for changes to the Food and Grocery Code that would slap major grocery stores with fines of up to $10 million for violating the code, amid concerns over rising food prices.
A court has found iSignthis and its former CEO Nickolas John Karantzis breached the Corporations Act in disclosures to the stock market about one-off revenue and the termination of the fintech’s business arrangement with Visa.
The ACCC has raised concerns that Singaporean agricultural giant Olam Agri Holding’s bid to acquire ASX-traded cotton ginner Namoi Cotton could reduce competition and stick cotton farmers with higher prices, one month after flagging similar concerns with Louis Dreyfus’ competing takeover proposal.
Australia’s largest car dealership Eagers Automotive has backpaid 13,000 staff more than $16 million after the Fair Work Ombudsman found that five of its subsidiaries underpaid employees.
The United Firefighters Union has lost an appeal of two Fair Work Commission decisions, with the Full Federal Court finding that a commissioner did not err in deciding the matter at a later time.
Medibank failed to put in place baseline security measures, including multi-factor authentication, to safeguard sensitive information from a hacker in 2022, who stole an IT contractor’s credentials and logged in to the health insurer’s private network three months before the company learned its data was compromised, the OAIC says.
A former Ernst & Young partner accused of promoting tax exploitation schemes wants to strike out portions of the ATO’s case, but the tax office argues he has threatened the application since last year and is preoccupied with a satellite fight to keep his name out of the media.