Wholesale or sophisticated investor status under s 708 of the Corporations Act does not shield financial product promoters from liability for misleading or deceptive conduct under s 12DA of the ASIC Act. Where a promoter of a complex financial product knows that the investor has not read the product documentation and arranges a meeting to explain the product, the promoter's failure to disclose critical differences between the new product and a prior product with which the investor is familiar may constitute misleading conduct by silence. The investor's failure to read product documentation does not destroy the causal connection between the misleading conduct and the investor's loss, provided the misleading conduct materially contributed to the loss.
The full text is available to signed-in members, including the 3 later cases that cite this judgment.