A judge has refused to join the insurer of collapsed Sydney builder Reed Constructions to insolvent trading proceedings brought by the company’s liquidators, after finding it was unreasonable to expect the insurance company to irrevocably confirm coverage.
An appeals court has found insurers AIG Australia and Catlin Australia have to cover part of a $6 million settlement agreed to by Bank of Queensland last year in a class action brought by investors in a multimillion dollar Ponzi scheme by jailed fraudster Bradley Sherwin.
Construction group Icon Co has dragged insurers Liberty Mutual Insurance and QBE Underwriting to court for allegedly refusing to provide coverage after the Opal Tower disaster in December last year, which led to thousands of residents being evacuated.
AMP Financial Planning has attempted to qualify its admission to so-called insurance churn allegations by the corporate watchdog, suggesting it might not have admitted to “all contraventions” if it had known ASIC would push for up to 120 separate breaches and $36 million in penalties.
The corporate watchdog has proposed a complete ban on unsolicited telephone sales of life insurance and consumer credit insurance, as an urgent placeholder ahead of wider reforms recommended after last year’s banking royal commission.
We have started to see the Federal Court use its discretionary powers in respect of class actions to order defendants to disclose their insurance policies to plaintiffs. The emergence of these disclosure orders is an example of the flexible and pragmatic approach increasingly being adopted by the Federal Court in class actions, say Johnson Winter & Slattery’s Frances Dreyer and Nicholas Briggs.
The corporate watchdog has warned “robust” enforcement action is on the cards for banks and lenders, after a review found consumer credit insurance policies to be “extremely poor value for money”, paying out as little as 11 cents per dollar spent in premiums on average.
The funder backing the IAG add-on insurance class action has agreed to a fixed 25 per cent commission, after the plaintiff copped criticism from a judge for the largely redacted funding agreement which called for lower rates if the case settled by a certain date.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission has asked a court to impose penalties of up to $36 million on an AMP subsidiary for failing to take reasonable steps to stop its representatives from churning life insurance policies.
AIG Australia has failed to convince the Full Federal Court that an insolvency exclusion in a directors and officers policy held by Kaboko Mining should exempt it from covering claims brought by the collapsed mining company against four former executives after a failure to repay a US$5.95 million loan allegedly led to the company’s insolvency.