Wealth manager also being sued over allegedly misleading Asic after banking royal commission revelations

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Wealth manager AMP will face a fourth class action over revelations it charged customers for advice they never received and then repeatedly misled the corporate regulator.

Law firm Slater and Gordon announced on Thursday it had filed proceedings against the financial giant on Thursday. The firm described the case as “likely to be one of Australia’s largest ever investor class actions”.

The action is being launched on behalf of anyone who bought shares between 7 June 2012 and 15 April 2018.

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It follows three previous class actions against AMP, launched by Shine Lawyers, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and Phi Finney McDonald.

At the financial services royal commission, AMP was revealed to have misled the Australian Securities and Investments Commission 20 times about the extent and nature of the fee-for-no-service scandal.

The revelations claimed the job of the AMP chief executive, Craig Meller, and wiped $2.2bn off the company’s market value during the commission’s two-week financial advice hearing.

AMP’s chair, Catherine Brenner, resigned from her position in late April and the board faced a revolt at its shareholder meeting last month.

Slater and Gordon believes the failure to disclose the full extent of the fee-for-no-service affair “may have constituted a breach of the ASX listing rules and the Corporations Act ... and caused AMP shares to trade at a price significantly greater than their true value”.

AMP apologises to shareholders at AGM: 'We let you down' Read more

AMP was also shown to have interfered with a supposedly independent report, prepared by law firm Clayton Utz, on the same issue. The changes AMP made to the report appeared to downplay the knowledge and involvement of the company’s most senior executives.



Slater and Gordon says AMP charged about 15,000 customers for advice that was not actually provided between 2006 and at least November 2016.



“The practice of deliberately charging customers in circumstances where AMP knew it was not entitled to do so, and the subsequent misleading of Asic, arose from inadequate monitoring, reporting and governance controls, and a lack of verification procedures and proper oversight of interactions with Asic,” the law firm said on its website.

AMP acknowledged it had been served with the Slater and Gordon class action and said it would defend all four class actions.

“AMP is vigorously defending all proceedings,” it said in a statement. “We are hopeful these class actions can be consolidated in the [New South Wales] supreme court in Sydney, which already has a well-progressed timeline, to provide the most efficient process and greater certainty for all involved.”