Mortgage lending and investment company RMBL has agreed to pay $3 million to settle a class action alleging it charged excessive fees on loans and made misleading representations under its contributory mortgage fund scheme.
Companies and other defendants forked over big sums last year to settle more than 20 class actions, with a total of at least $734 million being paid out. Here are the top 10 class action settlements and the law firms and funders that negotiated them.
Defunct Dover Financial, which faces a penalty hearing next year after it was found to have misled customers with an inaptly titled ‘client protection policy’, can bring an application for evidence from the corporate regulator that the policy did not harm anyone.
Litigation funder IMF Bentham has thrown in the towel in a battle over its cut of a $42 million settlement in a class action against dairy cooperative Murray Goulburn, accepting the Federal Court’s proposed 25 per cent commission rate after initially seeking 32 per cent.
Two months after rejecting the deal because the litigation funder’s cut appeared excessive, a judge has approved a $42 million class action settlement with Murray Goulburn while the funder keeps up the fight over its commission.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission has won its case against defunct financial advisor Dover Financial and its former director, who famously collapsed during the banking royal commission, with a judge saying the company engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct through its inaptly titled ‘client protection policy’.
Whether judges can alter the terms of litigation funding agreements in class actions is a question that will remain unsettled for now, after litigation funder IMF Bentham chose to sidestep a lengthy, costly and risky challenge to the reach of the court’s powers.
Murray Goulburn has agreed to pay $37.5 million to resolve the second of two shareholder class actions over its 2016 profit forecasts, as the $42 million settlement of the first class action is held up over questions about the litigation funder’s commission.
The funder backing a shareholder class action against Woolworths wants a 35 percent slice of any settlement or judgment in the $100 million case, according to its agreement with the applicants.
A judge’s decision refusing to approve a $42 million settlement in a shareholder class action against Murray Goulburn because of a “too high” funder’s commission has set the stage for a showdown over the power of courts to alter funding agreements, a battle potentially more consequential than the fight over common fund orders now before the High Court.