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Medibank has been issued with yet another shareholder class action following the major data breach it suffered last year.
The class action has been commenced in the Supreme Court of Victoria by law firm Phi Finney McDonald, which alleges that “Medibank engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct and breached its continuous disclosure obligations in relation to the adequacy of its privacy and information security protections”, according to its media release.
Principal lawyer for Phi Finney McDonald, Cameron Myers, has said that the law firm’s preliminary investigation concluded that this was grounds for Medibank to compensate its shareholders for losses that suffered as a result.
“Medibank’s customers and shareholders quite rightly expected the company, as one of Australia’s largest private health insurers, to take adequate steps to protect the incredibly sensitive information that it held,” he said.
“Indeed, Medibank fostered this belief by informing the market that it had appropriate protections in place.”
“Based on our preliminary investigations, we believe that Medibank shareholders are entitled to be compensated for losses suffered from the erosion of trust and confidence in Medibank once the true state of affairs was acutely exposed.”
Phi Finney McDonald has iterated that the class action is separate to the prior privacy litigation that was launched by Medibank customers due to damages caused by the breach of their personal and health details.
“Phi Finney McDonald is accepting registrations from shareholders that held Medibank shares at the close of trade on 25 October 2022 at [email protected],” the media release added.
Since the cyber attack that affected 9.7 million of its customers in October last year, Medibank has had at least four class action lawsuits launched against it.
The first class action was launched by a trio of law firms — Maurice Blackburn, Bannister Law Class Actions and Centennial Lawyers — which claimed that the data breach was a “betrayal of Medibank Private’s customers and a breach of the Privacy Act”.
Following this, Baker McKenzie filed a consumer class action in the Federal Court, soon followed by a shareholder class action by Quinn Emanuel and another consumer class action by Slater & Gordon.
The price tag for Medibank is adding up, with the total price tag, according to analysts via The Australian, reaching as high as $150 million.
On top of this, Medibank has been required to hold an additional $250 million in capital by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, which will only lift the hold once the company can complete a more detailed remediation plan.
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