The power of courts to choose a single winner from a contest of competing class actions is not the likely target of the High Court in taking up a challenge to last year’s beauty parade of shareholder proceedings against AMP, but the analysis behind the decision to award Maurice Blackburn the prize could face scrutiny, experts say.
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.
A former general counsel who claims she was sacked from AMP after raising concerns about the company’s fees for no services conduct has mostly succeeded in her bid for further particulars of allegations made in the company’s defence, including a claim that she called “tantamount to extortion”.
Two units of AMP have paid a $536,000 penalty for failing to report derivative transactions, with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission slamming the company for “serious inadequacies” in its reporting processes.
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.
Former AMP general counsel Larissa Cook, who is suing the financial services giant for alleged bullying, wants her former employer to provide details of claims in its defence that senior executives raised concerns about her conduct and that her performance was being “managed”.
AMP will face a class action alleging its financial representatives pushed AMP inflated insurance policies onto 100,000 customers despite knowing that better policies could be found through other providers.
Six of Australia’s biggest financial services institutions have so far paid or offered $749.7 million in compensation to hundreds of thousands of customers who were provided with non compliant financial advice or charged fees for no service, but the refunds to date are just the tip of the iceberg.
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.
A year after Commissioner Kenneth Hayne released his scathing report, companies in the financial services sector are still facing fresh class actions over conduct aired at the banking royal commission, and the pace has even picked up in recent months.