The wealthy owners of a Melbourne shoe manufacturer are taking a unit of property developer JD Group to trial this week, alleging “artist impressions” of a nearly $10 million off-the-plan high rise inner city apartment were misleading and deceptive.
Payouts in class actions in 2020 largely kept pace with the previous year despite the financial strain of the COVID-19 pandemic, with companies and other defendants paying more than $696 million to settle class actions last year.
Shareholders of collapsed vocational training company Vocation are poised to get about half of a $50 million settlement reached last month in a complex, long-running class action alleging the company failed to make adequate disclosures about its contracts with the Victorian Department of Education.
Bourke Street cafe Barfly’s has agreed to hand over $646,250 to the court in trust in an ongoing spat over its legal bills with a law firm that negotiated a $2.4 million settlement for the cafe in a negligence case.
Notice of the discontinuance of a class action on behalf of Slater & Gordon shareholders against Pitcher Partners need not be sent to all group members, a judge has ruled, acknowledging there would be “significant practical difficulties” with trying to reach everyone.
A judge has expressed skepticism at claims by accounting firm Pitcher Partners that the lead applicant of a now dropped class action over its auditing advice to Slater & Gordon should be hit with indemnity costs for discontinuing the case.
A judge has criticised a law firm that is suing its former client, Melbourne cafe Barfly’s, for $745,000 in legal fees after the firm sought to join the brother-in-law of Barfly’s owner Tony Hachem to the case.
Johnson Winter & Slattery persisted with a shareholder class action over auditing advice given to Slater & Gordon despite concerns about the strength of the claims raised in late 2017, Pitcher Partners has told the Federal Court as it seeks indemnity costs for the now abandoned proceeding.
Dropping a class action against accounting firm Pitcher Partners over Slater & Gordon’s disastrous acquisition of UK professional services firm Quindell will leave group members no worse off than they were when the proceeding first commenced, the Federal Court has heard.
A self-represented James Mawhinney, the director of troubled Mayfair 101 director, has accused ASIC in court of misleading the judge in an ex-parte application brought in August that saw provisional liquidators appointed to the investment firm and Mawhinney banned from transferring assets out of Australia.