Optus, Qantas and billionaire Pratt family among companies, identities in court in 2024
Some of Australia’s biggest business identities and companies are set to face court in 2024. | LIST
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Giant firms such as Qantas and Meta put on notice by Australia’s key corporate watchdogs are among those in a line-up of high-profile companies and people – including the Pratt family and Andrew Forrest – to face court in 2024.
It comes after a blockbuster 2023, in which some of the nation’s wealthiest business identities including Gina Hancock and the Wright family, joined little-known Australians taking on the country’s biggest companies.
Here are the cases to watch this year.
Qantas faces class action on Covid travel credits, ACCC on ‘ghost flights’
The national carrier is set to face another year of intense scrutiny, after 2023 saw pressure heaped on former chief executive Alan Joyce over the company’s call to sack 1700 baggage handlers, and other controversies, including the government’s rejection of Qatar Airways’ bid to nearly double its flights into Australia and soaring customer dissatisfaction amid record flight cancellations and delays.
In what could be a blockbuster 2024 case, the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission and Qantas are set to clash in court over allegations that the airline mislead consumers when it sold tickets to 8000 cancelled flights between May 2021 and July 2022 for an average of 16 days after they were canned.
Qantas will defend the claims, saying no customer was left out of pocket and it was in fact selling “a bundle of particular rights” rather than “a particular flight”.
The regulator and the airline have already traded barbs in court and through documents, including when the ACCC accused Qantas of failing to properly explain why it continued to sell the flights.
Qantas rejected ACCC’s suggestions that its concise response was “deficient”, “vague” and “unspecific”.
The so-called ghost flights matter will next be heard in the Federal Court in February, with the corporate regulator seeking an acknowledgment of deceptive conduct, penalties and a compliance program.
Under new chief executive Vanessa Hudson, the airline also faces a class action on behalf of thousands of passengers whose flights were cancelled amid the Covid-19 pandemic and who did not receive timely refunds but credits instead.
The action, led by firm Echo Law, argues Qantas unfairly benefited from $1bn revenue from flights that were cancelled and while it issued travel credits, they are worth less than cash refunds. A judge has ordered mediation to take place by July.
Paula Hitchcock v the Pratt siblings
Children of Australia’s cardboard box-manufacturing and recycling billionaire Richard Pratt are set to return to court in the new year, amid allegations from Pratt’s love child, Paula Hitchcock, that her half siblings, including Anthony Pratt, Heloise Waislitz and Fiona Geminder, cut her out of the family trust.
Hitchcock launched a NSW Supreme Court bid to be included in the trust in 2022, and has claimed the family attempted to rule her out of the Pratt Family Holdings trust when she was a child by entering into a “deed of exclusion” at the request of one or more Pratt siblings.
It’s not the first time Hitchcock has been at the centre of a court battle involving the Pratt family, after the 26-year-old and her mother Shari-Lea challenged the late businessman’s will in 2010 following his death in 2009.
They ultimately lost a NSW case for a greater share of Mr Pratt’s fortune, and settled a similar case in the Victorian Supreme Court.
Hitchcock was left a mansion in Sydney’s Watson’s Bay and a rural property on the NSW south coast, along with $23m worth of shares.
Two of Pratt’s mistresses lodged legal claims against his will after he died aged 74 from prostate cancer.
Hitchcock was one, while Maddison Ashton was the second.
Optus bid to keep hacking report secret from class action
Capping off a disastrous 2023 for Australia’s second biggest telco, Optus is set to remain under pressure in the year ahead as it prepares to defend a class action brought by law firm Slater and Gordon in the wake of a cyber attack in which 10,200 customers’ personal data was leaked online.
Ahead of the trial, Federal Court judge Jonathan Beach ruled a key report on the attack could not be kept secret as Optus wanted, after the company fought to keep it hidden from the public and claimed it should be covered by privilege because its primary purpose was to assess legal risk.
But in late November, Optus filed an application with the court to appeal that decision and in a bid to keep the report – completed by Deloitte to review the cyber attack along with security systems, controls and processes – secret.
In a sign of the acrimonious nature of the court battle, Justice Beach slammed an early spat over confidentiality arrangements for documents between Optus and Slater and Gordon as “frankly ridiculous”.
Kelly Bayer Rosmarin was forced to quit as chief executive after a second scandal enveloped the company within one year of the hack in which more than 10 million customers including businesses were offline for hours on November 8, due to a national outage caused by a routine software upgrade.
Fortrend battle between ex-partners Stephen Lyle and Christopher Wollerman and Joe Forster
A bust-up between two former Fortrend Securities partners who walked out of the global equities firm to Shaw and Partners is set to boil over during a trial involving Stephen Lyle and Christopher Wollerman.
Fortrend boss Joe Forster has made a series of allegations against the two brokers, including that they accessed confidential documents relating to the firm’s high net worth clients in a bid to poach them.
Lyle and Wollerman say they relied on publicly accessible information to contact clients after they left the firm where they worked for more than a decade.
Fortrend says 64 clients followed the two men to Shaw and Partners.
According to some of the more recent documents lodged in the case, Lyle and Wollerman have asked the court to prevent Forster from communicating with the poached clients in a way that is “derogatory” and to stop him from attending the Shaw and Partners office on Collins St in Melbourne without prior approval.
A trial in the matter is scheduled for seven days starting from March 18.
Andrew Forrest, competition regulator v Meta
Meta will have to fight two court cases simultaneously over accusations it failed to remove fake cryptocurrency advertising on Facebook featuring celebrities, including mining magnate Andrew Forrest.
The tech giant lost a bid in the Federal Court to have the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission case brought against it paused while Forrest’s case in the West Australian Supreme Court goes ahead too.
Corporate watchdog takes on giants over greenwashing, crypto
The Australian Securities & Investments Commission will continue to prosecute and await judgment on three key court cases against financial services companies Mercer, Vanguard and Active Super over claims they pumped up their climate credentials in order to encourage investment.
ASIC will also progress its civil case against Bit Trade Pty Ltd, provider of the Kraken crypto exchange to Australian customers, after it allegedly failed to comply with the design and distribution obligations for the margin trading product it offers on the trading platform.
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Originally published as Optus, Qantas and billionaire Pratt family among companies, identities in court in 2024
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