The Indian mining company Adani has agreed to end its marathon legal pursuit of the environmental activist Ben Pennings.<\/p>\n
Pennings declared victory on Thursday, after the Queensland<\/a> supreme court signed off on orders on Wednesday, ending the five-and-a-half-year court battle. The order requires Pennings not to seek to acquire Adani\u2019s confidential information or to ask others to do so, but the company has dropped a demand for payment of damages which at one stage stood at $600m.<\/p>\n The case began in 2020. Adani made an unsuccessful application<\/a> to conduct an unannounced search of Pennings\u2019s family home in June 2020, for possible evidence he had obtained its confidential information related to the Carmichael coalmine.<\/p>\n Sign up: AU Breaking News ema<\/a><\/p>\n Court documents in that case detailed that Adani hired a private investigator to surveil the activist and his family members, including taking photographs of him walking his then nine-year-old daughter to school.<\/p>\n Adani then lodged a civil claim against Pennings, the national spokesperson for the group Galilee Blockade, alleging he sought to disrupt the operations of the Carmichael coalmine<\/a>, its suppliers and contractors.<\/p>\n In 2023 Adani dropped the part of its claim<\/a> that Pennings had unlawfully accessed secret information.<\/p>\n The long-time activist has repeatedly described the company\u2019s legal action as a Slapp suit, a strategic lawsuit against public participation<\/a>.<\/p>\n At a press conference on Thursday, he said his was the biggest, longest and most expensive Slapp suit in the country\u2019s history. He accused the company of making an example of him in order to scare other opponents of its project.<\/p>\n \u201cCorporate-run Slapp suits are just an affront to democracy, far as I\u2019m concerned,\u201d he said, calling on the government to move to ban them, as has happened in American states and Europe.<\/p>\n Adani said Pennings had damaged its business. The company claimed his actions had caused several contractors to quit, including drilling company Downer.<\/p>\n It alleged he \u201corchestrated a sustained campaign\u201d against the Carmichael project, soliciting employees to leak secret information to him and that he had used it to harass contractors.<\/p>\n Pennings has agreed not to obtain Adani\u2019s confidential information or ask others to obtain it.<\/p>\n Mick Crowe, the chief operating officer of Bravus Mining<\/a> & Resources (Adani\u2019s Australian mining business), said the business was pleased Pennings had agreed to make the undertaking.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Breaking News Australia<\/p>\n Get the most important news as it breaks<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n \u201cWe started this legal action in the supreme court to stop Mr Pennings from harassing and intimidating our employees and contractors,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cThis damages claim was never about the money. All we wanted was for Mr Pennings to stop trying to get our confidential information and using it to harass and intimidate our contractors and suppliers to pressure them to stop working with us.<\/p>\n \u201cOver the years a number of high-profile businesses walked away from us because of his campaign.<\/p>\n \u201cSome of those who stayed with us had to spend money on security to protect themselves from protests, lock-ons and office invasions.\u201d<\/p>\n With a five-year injunction preventing him from campaigning against the company now lifted, Pennings said he intended immediately return to direct action against the mine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Indian mining company Adani has agreed to end its marathon legal pursuit of the environmental activist Ben…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":311509,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-311508","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311508"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311508\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/311509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}