The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has appointed an esteemed Herbert Smith Freehills competition partner who defeated some of the regulator’s most high-profile merger challenges to be a commissioner.
Money transfer business Vina Money Transfer and two of five individuals accused of fixing foreign exchange rates on millions of dollars transferred between Australia and Vietnam will plead guilty to criminal cartel charges, a court has heard.
Former Slater & Gordon managing director Andrew Grech has told the Federal Court he regretted his “catastrophic error” in approving the $1.2 billion acquisition of Quindell’s professional services division, which resulted in massive losses for the plaintiffs law firm.
Law firm Arnold Bloch Leibler will part with $28 million in its settlement with Slater & Gordon shareholders over advice ahead of the plaintiffs firm’s disastrous $1.2 billion Quindell acquisition.
A judge has dressed down ASIC over the handling of its action against GetSwift, criticising the regulator’s failure to seek a court injunction to prevent the company’s relocation to Canada.
Law firm Norton Rose Fulbright has won its appeal of a $160,000 judgment in favour of former partner Thomas Martin, with the Full Federal Court finding Martin’s allegations of deceit arose from “an excess of suspicion” and “causal connections of the most tenuous kind”.
The judge who made findings against the son of the mastermind behind the Banksia class action scam may have formed strong views about the 27-year-old’s role before he testified and used the flawed suggestion that he was his father’s right-hand man as an “evidential gap filler”, an appeals court has been told.
A judge hearing the second ever application for a group costs order in a shareholder class action against early childhood education provider G8 Education has heard she should reject the request because it is not “appropriate or necessary” to ensure justice in the proceeding.
Financial services company AMP has lost its bid to de-class representative proceedings brought on behalf of 1.5 million insurance customers.
Beach Energy has been hit with a second shareholder class action in as many days over allegedly misleading earnings projections for its Western Flank oil and gas reserves in the Cooper Basin.