The High Court has agreed to weigh in on a decision last year to pick Maurice Blackburn’s case as the winner of a beauty parade of shareholder class actions against AMP over the wealth manager’s controversial fees for no service.
Westpac has been hit with another class action over alleged anti-money laundering breaches, teeing up a high-stakes beauty parade over which firm will lead the class action against the bank.
An individual claimant accusing AMP Financial Planning of ignoring multiple attempts to gain remediation for alleged insurance re-writing conduct was granted permission to voice his displeasure in court, while ASIC and AMP grapple with the details of a remediation program for insurance churn victims.
The Federal Court has imposed a penalty of almost $5.2 million on AMP Financial Planning after finding it was “reckless” in its “lamentable failure” to properly respond to a now banned adviser who was churning life insurance for higher commissions.
Westpac is now facing at least eight class actions in various US courts seeking $200 million from the bank for allegedly failing to alert shareholders to violations of anti-money laundering laws.
A judge overseeing the first of what could be many shareholder class actions over Westpac’s anti-money laundering breaches — brought by class action specialists Phi Finney McDonald — has given other law firms a three-week deadline to notify the court if they plan to file competing proceedings.
A judge has consolidated competing shareholder class actions against builder Lendlease brought by rival plaintiffs law firms, but has rejected the firms’ bid to jointly run the litigation and says one of them must go.
A challenge by Quinn Emanuel to a NSW Supreme Court decision staying its shareholder class action against AMP has been unanimously dismissed by the Court of Appeal, which found the class action beauty contest was not decided in error and that subsequently filed representative proceedings were not an abuse of process.
A judge has given the thumbs up to AMP’s new program to identify and compensate victims of so-called insurance churning by its financial planning arm after inadequacies were revealed in the original scheme.
The plaintiffs firms running rival shareholder class actions against construction giant Lendlease have pitched a proposal to join their competing cases, a plan that should find favour with the judge overseeing the cases, who recently forced the consolidation of three duplicate class actions against failed engineering firm RCR Tomlinson.