Law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan will push forward with an investor class action against failed engineering company RCR Tomlinson on its own, with two firms driving competing actions agreeing to step down after a judge forcibly consolidated all three proceedings.
Pitcher Partners has been ordered to hand over information about its professional indemnity insurance in two shareholder class actions over its role as Slater & Gordon’s auditor.
ASIC has abandoned its market manipulation case against National Australia Bank contractor Whitebox Trading, just over a month after the financial regulator decided to appeal the Federal Court’s primary decision to throw out their case.
The plaintiffs in an investor class action brought against the insurers of Dick Smith have lost an early bid to determine the viability of their claim, amid concerns that the total value of five separate cases against the failed retailer will exhaust the $300 million limit of two insurance policies.
The parties in two shareholder class actions brought against online fashion retailer Surfstitch will make one “last, final attempt” to resolve the proceedings in mediation after a proposed settlement was thwarted by a judge last year, a court heard Friday.
Group members in a recently settled class action against Westpac unit BankSA over its conduct in connection with convicted Ponzi schemer Michael Samra are expected to get 40 per cent of the confidential settlement, a result a judge said wasn’t as bad as he might have feared.
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.
Veritas Advisory liquidator David Iannuzzi has admitted to “quite significant deficiencies” in his conduct as a liquidator and agreed to a 10-year ban from serving as an insolvency practitioner.
Two former executives of Dick Smith may seek to vacate an upcoming trial date for two class actions against the failed retailer, after recently being hit with cross claims by the company’s former auditor, Deloitte.
Allianz and a number of other insurers of Dick Smith are now facing a class action over the extent of coverage under an insurance policy for the collapsed electronics retailer’s initial public offering.