On 3 August 2018, Inghams Enterprise Pty Ltd (Inghams) successfully appealed a decision by the District Court of Queensland which found the company negligent for failing to protect a female employee from being attacked by an ex-employee whilst returning to her car after her shift. The Queensland Court of Appeal allowed the appeal on the basis the trial judge erred in finding that Inghams’ breach of duty caused the employee’s injury.
In the recent case of Commissioner of Taxation v Primary Health Care Limited [2017] FCAFC 131 (24 August 2017) the Full Federal Court dismissed the Commissioner’s appeal of a decision of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (Tribunal) to treat five objections to assessments for the financial years 2003 to 2007 as having been lodged in time. The main issue in dispute arose because the Commissioner changed his mind about the correct tax treatment of a long-standing business model.
According to partners Eric Adams and Mark Rankin, a recent Florida appellate court upheld a lower court’s ruling that an Attorney General has the authority to dismiss a pending qui tam action even if they had previously declined to intervene.
Qui tam comes from a Latin phrase that translates to “who as well for the king as for himself sues in this matter.” In this case of first impression, Zoltan Barati filed suit under the Florida False Claims Act (FCA), which the Attorney General later filed a voluntary dismissal of the action. The FCA allows an individual or the State to sue a person or company who files a false claim to the State for payment.
When choosing a trade or business name it may seem like a good idea to incorporate the location of your business into the name. There are benefits: it is helpful for marketing, it gives your audience an idea of where your business is and who your market is, it can help establish your business in a neighborhood, and it can help you build a brand based on community and locality.
However, using the location of your business in your trade or business name can cause difficulties when it comes to registering that name as a trade-mark. Under section 12(1) (b) of the Trade-marks Act, a trade-mark is not registerable if it is clearly descriptive or deceptively misdescriptive of the place of origin of the goods or services with which the trade-mark is used, unless that trade-mark has acquired distinctiveness through its use.
Alongside changes made this year to Russian civil legislation as part of an ongoing modernization process of the Civil Code, some notable changes have also emerged in case law. Russian courts currently have changed their traditional interpretation of many statutory regulation issues, and are taking new approaches. This has affected the implementation of existing statutes by parties to contractual relationships. Below we point out some examples of such changes in the case law.
“Future” Real Estate Acquisition
In general, the acquisition of “future” property (property which does not exist upon a contract signing, but will exist upon the contract’s closing) is allowed by section 2 article 455 in the Civil Code of the Russian Federation. However, the established case law in Russia has traditionally maintained the position that such acquisition is in fact impossible: the courts deem contracts void where the subject matter is not identified. At the same time it’s been widely recognized that the cadastral number of the real property must be the sufficient identification of such property in the contract. From the statutory perspective, new real property obtains its cadastral number only after the completion of its construction.
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