Freedom Foods and its auditor Deloitte are facing a class action investigation after a bombshell announcement of more than $590 million in write-downs stemming from accounting irregularities stretching back several years.
Coca-Cola Amatil is facing a lawsuit for allegedly infringing an Australian company’s patent for a drink container allegedly used in popular products like Mount Franklin water and Powerade sports drink.
Pharmaceutical ingredients company Alkaloids of Australia and former export manager Christopher Joyce have been charged over a cartel following a price-fixing investigation by the ACCC linked to the active ingredient in stomach cramp drug Buscopan.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission has filed civil penalty proceedings against the Commonwealth Bank of Australia for allegedly saddling consumers with $2.9 million in inflated interest rates on their business overdraft accounts on more than 12,000 occasions.
An Australian concrete product maker has settled a lawsuit brought by US industrial equipment manufacturer Illinois Tool Works over its patents for precast concrete products.
The son of the lawyer and funder at the centre of an alleged fee scandal in the Banksia Securities class action was not his father’s righthand man because the late Mark Elliott did not need a righthand man, his co-accused, former senior barrister Norman O’Bryan, has told a court.
A judge has again postponed signing off on a $1.9 million settlement in a $65 million sham contracting class action against fundraiser Appco Group after expressing “disquiet” about the deal in which the 1,100 group members would get “diddly squat” and ordered that notices be sent to group members informing them of their option to seek alternative lawyers.
A $50 million settlement has been reached in a long-running shareholder class action against defunct vocational training company Vocation that also spawned multiple cross-claims against the failed company’s auditor PricewaterhouseCoopers, law firm Johnson Winter & Slattery and individual directors.
Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu is seeking to strike out the misleading and deceptive conduct claims in a $4 million age discrimination lawsuit brought by a former partner, calling them “farcical” and “absurd”.
Google is seeking to assuage ACCC concerns that its planned $3 billion acquisition of fitness device company Fitbit would further entrench its market power by giving it access to a treasure trove of user data, promising the regulator that it will not use data collected through wearables for advertising purposes for at least 10 years.
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