The Federal Court has ordered Public Bank to pay RM30 million each in equitable, exemplary, and aggravated damages to National Feedlot Corporation and three others for disclosing its accounts to the public.
PUTRAJAYA: The Federal Court has ordered Public Bank Bhd to pay RM90mil in damages to National Feedlot Corporation ( Corp), its chairman Datuk Mohamad Salleh Ismail, and three subsidiary companies for breaching confidentiality by leaking bank account information.
A three-judge panel, chaired by Chief Judge of Malaya Justice Hasnah Mohammed, made the decision on the quantum of damages here yesterday.
The court ordered the bank to pay RM30mil for equitable damages, RM30mil for aggravated damages and another RM30mil for exemplary damages.
It also imposed a 2% interest on the total, beginning yesterday, until the amount is paid off.
Other judges on the bench were Chief Judge of Sabah and Sarawak Justice Abdul Rahman Sebli and Federal Court judge Justice Abu Bakar Jais.
On May 26, the same panel dismissed Public Bank’s appeal in the lawsuit filed by Corp and four others.
The panel unanimously dismissed the bank’s appeal to overturn the Court of Appeal’s August 2023 decision on grounds that common law was not applicable in the case.
It ordered Public Bank to pay RM300,000 in costs to Corp and others.
Regarding a cross-appeal by Corp and others against the Court of Appeal’s award of RM10,000 in nominal damages, the court allowed the appeal but deferred the decision on the damages’ quantum until Wednesday.
On Aug 30, 2023, the Court of Appeal allowed an appeal by Mohamad Salleh and its subsidiaries against Public Bank for breaching contract confidentiality.
The appellate court found a serious misappreciation of evidence, warranting appellate intervention, and ordered Public Bank to pay RM500,000 in costs.
The lawsuit, filed on May 22, 2012, alleged the bank breached confidentiality by allowing banking transaction details to be revealed by then PKR vice-president Datuk Seri Rafizi Ramli, who recently resigned as Economy Minister.
They claimed the breach caused irreparable loss and damage to their business reputation under the Banking and Financial Institutions Act.
On July 29, 2019, the High Court dismissed the lawsuit against the bank.
When met by the media later, Mohamad Salleh thanked his legal team.
“My family and I... my wife and children, we went through several hardships over the years.
U.S. targets Google's online ad business monopoly in latest Big Tech lawsuit
WASHINGTON, - The U.S. Justice Department accused Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) Google on Tuesday of abusing its dominance in digital advertising, threatening to dismantle a key business at the heart of one of Silicon Valley's most successful internet companies.
The government said Google should be forced to sell its ad manager suite, tackling a business that generated about 12 percent of Google's revenues in 2021, but also plays a vital role in the search engine and cloud company's overall sales.
"Google has used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful means to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies," the antitrust complaint said.
Google, whose advertising business is responsible for about 80% of its revenue, said the government was "doubling down on a flawed argument that would slow innovation, raise advertising fees, and make it harder for thousands of small businesses and publishers to grow."
The federal government has said its Big Tech investigations and lawsuits are aimed at leveling the playing field for smaller rivals to a group of powerful companies that includes Amazon.com (AMZN.O), Facebook owner Meta Platforms (META.O) and Apple Inc (AAPL.O).
"By suing Google for monopolizing advertising technology, the DOJ today aims at the heart of the internet giant’s power," said Charlotte Slaiman, competition policy director at Public Knowledge. "The complaint lays out the many anticompetitive strategies from Google that have held our internet ecosystem back."
Tuesday's lawsuit by the administration of President Joe Biden, a Democrat, follows a 2020 antitrust lawsuit brought against Google during the term of Donald Trump, a Republican.
The 2020 lawsuit alleged violations of antitrust law in how the company acquires or maintains its dominance with its monopoly in online search and is scheduled to go to trial in September.
EIGHT STATES IN LAWSUIT
Eight states joined Tuesday's lawsuit, including Google's home state of California.
California State Attorney General Rob Bonta said that Google's practices have "stifled creativity in a space where innovation is crucial."
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said that Google's dominance had led to higher fees for advertisers and less money for publishers with ad space to offer. "We are taking action by filing this lawsuit to unwind Google’s monopoly and restore competition to the digital advertising business," he said in a statement.
Google shares were down 1.9 percent on Tuesday.
[1/2] A logo of Google is seen at its exhibition space, at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France June 15, 2022. REUTERS/Benoit Tessier
In addition to its well-known search, which is free, Google makes revenue through its interlocking ad tech businesses. The government asked for the divestiture of the Google Ad Manager suite, including Google's ad exchange, AdX.
Google Ad Manager is a suite of tools including one that allows websites to offer advertising space for sale and an exchange that serves a marketplace that automatically matches advertisers with those publishers.
Advertisers and website publishers have complained that Google has not been transparent about where ad dollars go, specifically how much goes to publishers and how much to Google.
The lawsuit raises concerns about certain products in the ad tech stack, where publishers and advertisers use Google's tools to buy and sell ad space on other websites. That business was about $31.7 billion in 2021 or 12.3 percent of Google’s total revenue. About 70% of that revenue goes to publishers.
An ad tech divestiture "may not be a game changer but it could be sneaky important to Google's ad targeting capability," said Paul Gallant with the Cowen Washington Research Group.
"It connects to all of Google's other businesses and ties them together. I think Google might be more concerned about losing ad tech down the road than people might think," Gallant said.
The company made a series of purchases, including DoubleClick in 2008 and AdMob in 2009, to help make it a dominant player in online advertising.
'PROJECT POIROT'
While Google remains the market leader by a long shot, its share of the U.S. digital ad revenue has been eroding, falling to 28.8% last year from 36.7% in 2016, according to Insider Intelligence.
The Justice Department asked for a jury to decide the case, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
The lawsuit lays out a number of Google's attempts to dominate the advertising market.
The complaint discussed header bidding, which was a way that companies could bypass Google to bid on ad space on websites.
It lays out a series of projects including one dubbed "Project Poirot" named after Agatha Christie’s master detective, Hercule Poirot. The project "was designed to identify and respond effectively to ad exchanges that had adopted header bidding technology."
The 149-page complaint said Google doubled down after Project Poirot's initial success in manipulating its advertisers' spending to reduce competition from rival ad exchanges. Rivals AppNexus/Xandr lost 31% of DV360 advertiser spending, Rubicon would lose 22%, OpenX would lose 42%, and Pubmatic would lose 26%, the complaint said.
Reporting by Diane Bartz and David Shepardson; additional reporting by Sheila Dang; editing by Chris Sanders and Grant McCool
https://youtu.be/rwt0KrzCbRQ Trump's gang self-exposed: We are ALL vaccinated! Covid-19 is a CIA plot against all mankind! https://youtu.be/Vbb-i3b7E4M
CDC Director Robert Redfield admits Americans seemingly dead influenza test coronavirus posthumously https://youtu.be/UPVpwiACveM
Over the past few weeks, the US has shot three arrows targeting China
https://youtu.be/IcPR6f1JMd4
Ex-colonialists should prepare for China’s counterpunch
An ambulance sits outside the US Capitol in Washington, DC, Monday. Photo: AFP
As of Wednesday, the total confirmed COVID-19 cases around the world have topped 2.5 million, with the US and European countries being the hardest hit, while the US alone has reported over 825,000 infection cases. What are leaders and politicians of these countries doing when their homelands are suffering from the coronavirus? Are they busy flattening the curve? Given the reports of Western media outlets, this seems to not be their focus, as they are sparing more efforts to duck the responsibilities for their inability.
Over the past month, some Western politicians have been shouting more loudly than ever to demand compensation from China, as if they will manage to call white for black with their political hysteria. Since the pandemic became increasingly severer day by day in Europe and particularly in the US, some Western countries that dominate the world's public opinion have been engaging in a ridiculous show of 1,000 ways to slander China.
To steal the spotlight, a batch of Western politicians dare say anything they want and pass any legislation they wish regardless of truth or facts. They have thoroughly interpreted their deep-rooted pirate-style mentality and how it works.
These politicians have accused China of so-called disinformation and delay in information sharing, while they have been neglecting what China has been trying to share with them from the very beginning and warn them out of goodwill.
From the moves of US senators such as Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley to Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, we can see the ghosts of Western imperialists and colonialists who raided around the world, burning and looting with guns and cannons.
What if these Western countries are treated with their very own pirate-style mentality? They shall be held accountable for what humanity is suffering in the past decades, even centuries. A great number of Westerners seem to have forgotten how they managed to quickly complete the original accumulation of capital and embark on the road of leading the world's development. In the Age of Discovery, Western civilization has spread across the world and the traditional powers seized a huge amount of resources in that process. Meanwhile, diseases such as cholera, malaria, yellow fever, and smallpox brought by the West's explorers doomed aborigines in the new continents.
The 1918 influenza pandemic, the most severe pandemic in recent history, infected an estimated total of 500 million people or one-third of the world's population at that time. The number of deaths was estimated to be at least 50 million worldwide. Some suggest the virus originated from Kansas, where it was identified in military personnel in spring 1918; while some believe New York City was the origin. If we adopt the West's above-mentioned mentality here, how dare the US not compensate the rest of the world for its failure of containing the virus within its borders?
If such mentality is justified, has the US compensated the world or at least apologized after the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic that originated from the country and resulted in an estimated range of deaths from between 151,700 and 575,400 people during the very first year the virus circulated?
There is no logic and no rationale that China has to bear infamy and compensate for mistakes it has never made. Is it that in the mind of many Westerners Chinese are born inferior to white people, so they never believe the Chinese can do anything better than them?
Things have changed in the world we are living in. Long gone are the good old times of imperialists and colonialists. If some people still uphold their political hysteria, they had better be prepared for China's counterpunch.
A real-life political farce is playing out in the hometown of famous American writer Mark Twain, a sharp critic of American democracy. Suing China as part of a choreographed "Blame China" campaign led by American hawks like Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt is one of the common tactics being used, as long-term anti-China political elites see Beijing's rising status as the biggest obstacle to "making America great again," observers said.
Responding to viral reports alleging that the novel coronavirus was leaked from a US military biochemical laboratory, Chinese scientists said that they could not make a judgment on the allegation, as the US had not given any public response on the issue.
In an exclusive interview with the Global Times, Max Blumenthal, founder of The Grayzone, said his US-based news outlet is not anti-US or pro-China as some people claimed. It “speaks for the people in the West who are opposed to war and who are skeptical of the narratives that were being fed.”
Seeking the origin of the virus is a serious and rational issue that calls for a science-based and professional approach. The so-called assumption that the virus came from a lab had long been dispelled by global scientists. The chief of the World Health Organization reiterated that there's no evidence that the virus was produced in a lab or for the purpose of making bioweapons
Conspiracy theorizing of this sort deflects attention from what actually went wrong. And it fuels the demonization of the Chinese political system at the same time we need collaboration between China and the rest of the world to deal with an urgent global pandemic.
