Settlement shelves tell-all Qantas book

Settlement shelves tell-all Qantas book

A tell-all book about Qantas’s 2011 fleet grounding has been permanently shelved after the airline and the book’s author reached an out-of-court settlement.

Lucinda Holdforth, the former speechwriter to Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce, was taken to court by Qantas after threatening to publish a manuscript detailing the inside story of the controversial grounding.

The book was titled Fighting Words and drew on Ms Holdforth’s experiences.

However, the manuscript has a permanent injunction on it after the two parties announced to the Supreme Court in Sydney that they had reached a confidential settlement.

A statement from Qantas said the injunction was due to the “commercial in confidence nature of the content”.

“Both parties consider the matter closed,” the statement said.

Ms Holdforth still worked for Qantas when the matter went to court in June but has since resigned from the company.

The settlement came after mediation urged by Supreme Court judge Patricia Bergin at the initial hearing.

It is understood 30 pages of the manuscript that do not feature Qantas are not covered by the injunction but it is not known what Ms Holdforth will do with that text.

Qantas took Ms Holdforth to court to stop the publication of Fighting Words, saying she had sought to exploit “confidential internal information that she was privy to”.

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