Customers of wealth manager Colonial First State were $10 million to $12 million better off without a litigation funder in a class action over the slow transfer of accounts to low cost MySuper funds, a judge has found.
The company behind the Ultimate Fighting Championship gym franchise has been ordered to pay $5 million to three franchisees after a judge found it misled them about businesses which were “near valueless” and unlikely to make profit.
Former Army major Heston Russell has panned the ABC’s argument that it is not liable to pay damages in his defamation case because he identified himself and was given an opportunity to respond to stories that suggested he was involved in murdering an Afghan prisoner.
A fed-up judge has vented his frustration with the problem of competing class actions in a move that appears to punish the second filed case against Medibank. But is he right that the courts are increasingly being asked to deal with duplicative proceedings? And was his order really all that drastic?
One of the two remaining class actions against the Department of Defence over the use of alleged toxic firefighting foam at military bases across the country has settled for $132.7 million on the eve of trial, with the final case going back to mediation.
More class action law firms have pounced on Downer EDI’s “accounting irregularities” that led to the company overstating profits by up to $40 million.
Automotive electronics company Directed Electronics is set to claw back $3.27 million in commission payments made to a former manager through a secret side agreement with South Korean giant Hanhwa, with a ruling on damages still to come in the five-year case.
A judge aggrieved by the “plague” of competing class actions in the courts has temporarily stayed a second data breach class action against Medibank, and directed the health insurer to ask the privacy commissioner to drop the investigation of a third case.
A recent decision by the Federal Court that questioned whether the introduction of a serious harm test in defamation law could infringe the Judiciary Act has shone a light on the need for a federal defamation framework, legal experts say.
An appeals court has shot down funder Augusta’s challenge to a decision that cut its commission in the Opal Tower class action, putting funders on notice that they will have to marshal compelling evidence to win approval for their returns from an increasingly watchful court.