Slater and Gordon almost doubled its profit to $46m and paid its first dividend in a decade. Most of the $10m payout goes to PE owner Allegro, which bought the firm for $150m in 2023. Quite the turnaround after an ASX share crash and a leak of 900 staff salaries: AFR

⚖️ Regulatory: The Federal Court has ordered small amount lender Sunshine Loans to pay a $5.5m penalty for charging customers an illegal $35 fee to move a repayment date, even when they weren’t in default. The National Credit Code only lets these lenders charge a handful of specific fees, and this wasn’t one of them. Sunshine collected almost $300k from the fee. It also fought the case hard, appealing all the way to the High Court. Derrington J said many of its arguments were “devoid of merit”, which pointed to a poor compliance culture: ASIC

⚖️ Contract: Two appellate decisions show courts won’t stretch contract wording further than it goes. In Shamrock v Cleanaway, the Queensland Court of Appeal rejected Cleanaway’s bid to make its contractor cover around $31m of rain damage under a broad indemnity. The damage had to be genuinely connected to the contractor’s work, not just happen on site during the job. In Aviation Utilities v Kahu, the WA Court of Appeal found a helicopter operator wrongly terminated over several minor breaches, because together they didn’t deprive it of a substantial part of the bargain: Lander & Rogers

⚖️ Privacy: Ex-customers aren’t fair game. SpinTel has paid a $653k penalty to ACMA for emailing former customers, some of whom had walked out the door up to 13 years earlier. The regulator found at least 32,394 breaches of s 16(1) of the Spam Act in just three months of 2025. SpinTel argued that consent could be inferred from the past relationship. It also relied on contract wording permitting marketing during a “continuing business relationship”. ACMA wasn’t buying it, because cancelling a service signals the relationship is over: HSF Kramer

The parents of Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old Seattle software engineer, are suing OpenAI over her death. They claim it gave her a plan to taper off her anti-seizure medication, told her not to mention it to her doctor, and said her seizures weren’t seizures. She died in February: The Guardian

Australia’s on track for its highest redundancies since COVID. ABS data shows 108,300 people were retrenched across July and August, and economist Jeff Borland puts it down to a slowing economy and AI. Woodside, Canva, Heidi Health and NAB have all swung the axe in recent weeks: AFR

🤖 Anthropic’s planned Nasdaq float, which could raise up to US$100bn at a ~US$1.5tn valuation, now has a UK retail offer. Slaughter and May is advising Anthropic on that piece, with HSF Kramer acting for platform RetailBook: NB

🏘️ Warburg Pincus has upped the ante again in the Ingenia Communities bidding war, offering up to $5.60 cash a share, 10 cents above its own and rival AVID Property Group’s previous offers. Ingenia shares last closed at $5.20: ASX

🤝 Cue has been sold to former Myer chairman Bill Wavish, just two months after collapsing into receivership. His consortium paid well above the $2m liquidation value: AFR

MinRes is being sued in the Federal Court after the Australian Human Rights Commission terminated a former staffer’s complaint. She alleges a senior manager sent her sexually suggestive late-night messages for three years, and that MinRes’ “whitewash” review let him resign before he could be sacked: AFR

ANZ posted a 31% jump in cash profit to $7.59bn, after cutting operating costs by 14% and sacking around 3,500 staff and contractors. Suncorp Bank took the biggest hit, with staff numbers down 19%, even though ANZ promised no net job losses for three years when it bought the bank in 2024: The Australian

David Jones owes suppliers about $100m in unpaid invoices, on top of $140m to lender Hilco and $80m to owner Anchorage. Meanwhile, ousted CEO Scott Fyfe is suing in the Vic Supreme Court, alleging shareholder oppression and seeking a forced buyout of his family’s 3.7% stake: AFR

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has admitted to an affair, following months of reports about his relationship with a suspected Chinese spy. The board has launched an independent investigation with outside counsel into whether he was targeted by foreign intelligence. Huang stays on for now: Bloomberg