The judge overseeing the settlement approval process in multiple class actions against Volkswagen over the diesel emissions scandal has criticised an application for a common fund order by the funder backing two Bannister Law-led lawsuits.
The Full Federal Court has handed a win to Hytera in its high-stakes intellectual property litigation with Motorola, allowing the Chinese radio manufacturer to file an amended defence arguing Motorola should have alerted it to the alleged theft of its source code by former employees sooner.
Motorola has urged the Full Federal Court to uphold a decision dismissing an amended defence by Chinese rival Hytera Communications that sought to blame the US tech company for not alerting it to the alleged theft of its source code sooner, saying a similar argument had already failed in an ongoing trade secrets case in the US.
Bail conditions have been set for a former BlueScope Steel executive charged with obstructing an Australian Competition and Consumer Commission criminal cartel probe into the steel company, the first criminal charges ever brought against an individual in relation to an ACCC investigation.
The competition regulator has been probing alleged cartel conduct by steel giant Bluescope for a number of years, counsel for the company told a court Friday as it sought transcripts of the watchdog’s compulsory interviews of witnesses and asked for five months to put on a defence.
Motorola has slammed competitor Hytera for its “spectacularly poor” handling of expert evidence in a high stakes intellectual property dispute between the two tech giants, arguing the pre-trial timetable should not be upended on account of the Chinese radio maker’s “pig-headed” insistence on using unavailable witnesses.
A challenge by Quinn Emanuel to a NSW Supreme Court decision staying its shareholder class action against AMP has been unanimously dismissed by the Court of Appeal, which found the class action beauty contest was not decided in error and that subsequently filed representative proceedings were not an abuse of process.
Prosecutors will not lay charges against BlueScope Steel over an alleged price-fixing conspiracy, but its former general manager of sales faces possible jail time after being charged with obstructing the ACCC’s investigation.
Volkswagen is nearing the end of the road in the dieselgate scandal in Australia, as the car company agrees to an in-principle resoltion of enforcement action by the ACCC while also finalising the details of the settlement of five class actions worth up to $127 million.
A judge has ordered engineering services firm CIMIC Group to pay the costs of a 2017 attempt to stay a competing class action against it, saying the bid was one the company “could never have successfully prosecuted”.