The Australian Securities and Investments Commission has filed Federal Court proceedings against Bank of Queensland and Bendigo and Adelaide Bank over alleged unfair terms in their small business contracts.
Commodity trading and mining company Glencore has won a fight with the Australian Taxation Office over a $92 million tax bill related to copper purchased from a subsidiary operating the Cobar mine in NSW.
A judge has thrown out an unlawful dismissal case brought by former HWL Ebsworth special counsel against the firm, describing his arguments as “trivial” and “wholly unrealistic”.
Counsel for WorleyParsons has denied the engineering firm’s attempt to end a shareholder class action mid-trial would be the start of a “brave new world” of no-case bids in representative proceedings, saying this was a rare instance of a case with “no chance of success”.
Insurance broker Jardine Lloyd Thompson is facing a second class action on behalf of local councils claiming it charged inflated premiums.
The Full Federal Court has shot down a challenge to a ruling denying horse vaccine maker Zoetis’ application for security for costs in an unfunded class action brought on behalf of horse owners alleging the company failed to warn about the potential side effects of the Hendra virus vaccine.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has taken private health insurer Medibank to court for falsely telling consumers they were not eligible for certain coverage under their insurance policies, with over 800 policy holders denied coverage for joint investigation or reconstruction procedures.
Radio Rentals and its insurer, AIG, have reached a $29 million settlement in a consumer class action alleging the company pushed misleading ‘Rent, Try, $1 Buy’ leases onto vulnerable customers.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has warned it could take enforcement action if its finds banks are misleading customers about foreign exchanges fees and warned banks’ use of their compliance obligations to deny banking services to their non-bank competitors could constrain competition in the market for foreign exchange services.
A recent Federal Court decision means cooperation between courts in different international jurisdictions, which would once have been regarded as entirely novel, may now be a welcome option for liquidators to achieve a more efficient liquidation of insolvent corporate groups, writes K&L Gates’ Jason Opperman, Katherine Smith and Catherine Crawford.