Award-wining architecture firm Ashton Raggatt McDougall and its former boss have agreed to pay a combined $975,000 in penalties for attempting to rig bids on a $250 million building project at Charles Darwin University.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has lost its challenge to a decision that tossed its case alleging NSW Ports stymied competition when it signed a 50-year agreement with the state to privatise two ports.
An appeals court grilled counsel for the ACCC on the first day of a hearing challenging the dismissal of its case over a NSW government deal to privatise two ports, calling on the lawyer to spell out how the state was alleged to be in competition with the consortium that took over the ports.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has appealed a judge’s decision throwing out its competition case over an agreement for the privatisation of two NSW ports, calling the case “a matter of significance for the Australian economy”.
The ACCC’s claim that NSW Ports stymied competition when it signed a 50-year agreement with the state to be compensated if the Port of Newcastle built a container terminal was based on “mere speculative hopes”, a judge found in tossing the competition watchdog’s regulatory action.
The ACCC has lost its regulatory action against NSW Ports alleging a 50-year agreement with the state, signed when Port Botany and Port Kembla were privatised in 2013, was anti-competitive.
The ACCC has reached the end of the line in its challenge to Pacific National’s $205 million acquisition of Aurizon’s Acacia Ridge Terminal in Queensland, with the High Court dismissing the competition regulator’s application to take up the appeal.
The competition regulator wants the High Court to hear its challenge to Pacific National’s $205 million acquisition of Aurizon’s Acacia Ridge Terminal in Queensland, saying the deal would entrench the rail freight carrier’s near monopoly on the east coast of Australia.
The ACCC has come up short in its appeal of a ruling that dismissed its challenge to Pacific National $205 million acquisition of Aurizon’s Acacia Ridge Terminal in Queensland, with the Full Federal Court also releasing Pacific National from an undertaking given to the court.
The jury trial for a criminal cartel case against mobility equipment provider Country Care and two employees is unlikely to start before next year due to restrictions on jury trials caused by the coronavirus pandemic, a judge has said.