The appellants appealed a decision certifying a class action regarding the Bre-X gold mine fraud.
The motion judge had restricted the common issues to conspiracy and fraud, declining to certify negligent misrepresentation as a common issue, and limited the class to shareholders who held shares on the date the possible fraud was publicly disclosed.
The Divisional Court dismissed the appeal, agreeing that negligent misrepresentation claims require individual inquiries into reliance and causation, making a class action not the preferable procedure for those claims.
The court also upheld the temporal restriction on the class, as shareholders who sold before the disclosure date could not have suffered losses caused by the misrepresentations.
