PRESS RELEASE: ASIC is effectively protecting, not punishing, pre-royal commission-level banking misconduct—Citizens Party
Just as Al Capone ran Chicago crime with the protection of the Chicago police, ANZ and the other big banks continue to engage in greed-driven misconduct with the effective protection of ASIC.
The following points demonstrate that ASIC’s response to ANZ’s misconduct is wholly inadequate:
- According to ASIC, ANZ has been stealing money from customers since at least 2016. ASIC has taken them to Court or fined them 11 times since then. ANZ doesn’t learn. It won’t change.
- ASIC has punished them again for again stealing from customers, including dead customers, and defrauding our Treasury by cooking the books on government bond sales. That caused every single Australian to pay higher interest rates.
- ASIC has—with great fanfare—announced the biggest fine it has ever levied: $240 million, against ANZ, which is just 3.6% of its 2024 annual profit.
- But ASIC could have levied a fine of $2.7 billion—more than 10 times higher. The difference would be like the difference between a needle prick and an amputation. The difference between “the cost of doing business” and “real deterrence”.
- Weak feckless simpering ASIC Chair Joe Longo said on ABC 7.30 last night there was no point going after individuals as these were long-standing systemic issues of “institutional failure”. But Paul O’Sullivan has been Chairman at ANZ since 2020. These fines are for conduct since 2019. Sullivan was Chair almost the whole time. He’s still Chair. Shayne Elliot was CEO the whole time. Maile Carnegie was head of the retail division—in which customers were thieved from—almost the whole time. Her punishment? She walked away with a $900,000 bonus last year. Elliot retired scot-free.
- ANZ didn’t do these things on its own. Its management directed the bank to do these things. But management gets off Scot-free, with million $$$ bonuses, while ordinary Aussie superannuation shareholders foot the bill. Baron Thurgood once said “a corporation has no soul to be damned, no body to be kicked.”
- Senator Bragg led a comprehensive review of ASIC last year. It recommended ASIC be split up. The government/Treasurer has ignored the Report.
- The bank executives are cheering.
- Nuno Matos, the new CEO of ANZ, has just downgraded the authority of the chief risk officer from executive management, down. This is a contravention of bank regulator APRA’s Prudential Standard APS220, which has force of law. APRA is also asleep at the wheel.
The Citizens Party has fought for decades to expose and clean up banking misconduct. It has worked closely with consumer champions and banking experts who fought for the banking royal commission, and then for the full implementation of the recommendations. The party has campaigned to expose ASIC as a weak and ineffective regulator by design, and to implement reforms to create a tough regulator that would be feared by the banks.
Citizens Party Research Director Robert Barwick asked: “Why is ASIC refusing to hold the management and executives to account? Why is it protecting Paul O’Sullivan and Shayne Elliot, who oversaw the whole mess?”
The Australian Citizens Party is an independent, federally-registered political party, founded in 1988. It is committed to policies that promote the economic development of Australia for the benefit of all its people, not just the vested corporate interests which have too much influence over the major political parties. It takes its inspiration from the "old Labor" party stalwarts including King O'Malley, who fought to establish Australia's national bank, the Commonwealth Bank, and John Curtin and Ben Chifley, who used the Commonwealth Bank to lead the economic mobilisation that saved Australia in WWII. The ACP fought against the privatisation of the Commonwealth Bank, which has concentrated financial power in Australia in the Big Four banking oligopoly that gouges short-term profits at the expence of Australians and the nation's economic development, and is campaigning to re-establish a national bank, modelled on the old Commonwealth Bank, as a government post office bank which would guarantee face-to-face banking services, and access to cash, for all communities, and break the Big Four banking oligopoly.
