Barrister Norman O’Bryan SC has failed in his last-ditch bid to reopen his defence in the Banksia class action to submit evidence he says shows he did not retain an interest in the litigation funder behind the case.
The judge overseeing the trial alleging fraud on the part of barristers and the funder behind a class action over Banksia Securities will be asked to award at least $32 million to the failed property lender’s 16,000 debenture holders for the serious misconduct alleged against the lawyers.
The Victorian government will argue for summary dismissal of two class actions filed over the bungled COVID-19 hotel quarantine program said to be responsible for the state’s second pandemic wave last year.
Fertility clinic Monash IVF says there are “serious questions” about whether a class action that accuses it of destroying viable embryos was validly commenced as a class action.
The wealthy founder of auto repair franchisor Ultra Tune has secured a temporary injunction against his ex-girlfriend and a former employee prohibiting them from distributing secret recordings after excerpts from one damaging audio file were published by Fairfax.
Two NAB units have indicated they will seek to dismiss a lawsuit over alleged MySuper mismanagement which the court recently ruled was not validly commenced as a class action if the lead applicant fails in his bid to replead.
A class action filed by Maurice Blackburn against NAB units MLC and NULIS was invalidly commenced thanks to a carve out in the Supreme Court Act that bars class actions involving trust property, the Victoria Supreme Court has found.
The son of the funder behind a class action at the centre of scandalous misconduct claims says he would have sought advice from a family friend if he had realised his father and counsel leading the case were misleading the court to inflate their profits from a $64 million settlement.
Solicitor Alex Elliott has said it never clicked with him that members of the legal team running the Banksia class action were misleading an appeals court when his father — the mastermind behind the alleged deception — told him to sign cheques for lawyers that they could not cash.
The funder accused of a fraudulent scheme to pocket inflated fees from the Banksia Securities class action produced less than 200 documents to the contradictor in the case and invented a story about a routine email purging practice to explain the discovery hole, a court has heard.