Maurice Blackburn’s funding model rejected by a judge overseeing a beauty parade of class actions against BHP appeared structured to incentivise the firm to push up its legal fees, an appeals court said Monday on the first day of a high stakes hearing challenging a decision to shut down two of three competing cases against the mining giant.
Accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers is resisting a notice to produce audit files in a consolidated shareholder class action over the collapse of education and training company Vocation, arguing its partners face a real risk of criminal and civil penalty proceedings and are entited to claim privilege against self-incrimination.
Law firm Maurice Blackburn has fired its opening salvo in a high-stakes appeal of a judge’s decision rejecting its class action against BHP over the Brazilian dam failure, saying the ruling deprived group members of pocketing higher net returns on any recovery and of choosing a more experienced firm to run the case for them.
Private training company Ashley Services and auditors Deloitte and Grant Thornton will pay a combined $14.6 million to settle a shareholder class action, and IMF Bentham says it may bank $7.2 million for funding the litigation.
Accounting firm Pitcher Partners, which is facing two shareholder class actions over auditing work for Slater & Gordon, is considering filing claims of its own against the law firm’s current auditor, Ernst & Young.
The battle over competing shareholder class actions against logistics tech company GetSwift is over, with the High Court rejecting a bid by one of the losing class action applicants to take another look at their case.
ANZ has reached an in-principle settlement in two class actions alleging it breached its responsible lending obligations by providing loans to purchasers of 7-Eleven franchises that were not financially viable.
A judge has rejected a bid by former directors of Slater & Gordon to throw out cross claims brought by Pitcher Partners in two shareholder class actions alleging the accounting firm wrongly signed off on the law firm’s financial reports ahead of a share price nosedive, saying it was possible Pitcher Partners’ claimed reliance on representations by the directors was reasonable.
Global pharmaceutical giant Lundbeck has launched a bid to escape a prior undertaking blocking it from appealing a court’s decision that allowed four generic drug makers to apply for licences to manufacture generic versions of popular antidepressant Lexapro.
An appeals court has sided with the tax office in a dispute against two corporate limited partnerships formed in the Cayman Islands, finding that ATO tax assessments issued for the sale of shares in global mining company Talison Lithium were valid and correct.