In civil penalty proceedings under the Corporations Act, the court's discretion to permit evidence in reply is governed by the same principles as in criminal cases, with the injunction to be 'more liberal' in civil cases unlikely to have practical effect given the penal consequences of disqualification orders. The determinative question is whether the defendants' evidence to which the plaintiff seeks to reply was reasonably foreseeable from the plaintiff's own case in chief. Where the defendants exercised their privilege against exposure to penalty by not disclosing their evidence until after the plaintiff closed its case, the plaintiff is not thereby entitled to adduce evidence in reply that could have been foreseen from its own evidence; but where the defendants raise genuinely new and unforeseeable matters, reply evidence will be permitted.
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