A Royal Commission into the Commonwealth Bank

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The Com­mon­wealth Bank’s response to the Sen­ate inves­ti­ga­tion of ASIC blames incom­pe­tence and indi­vid­u­als for the scan­dals at Com­mon­wealth Finan­cial Plan­ning Lim­it­ed. Chief exec­u­tive Ian Narev: “Poor advice pro­vid­ed by some of our advis­ers between 2003 to 2012 caused finan­cial loss and dis­tress and I am tru­ly sor­ry for that.”

This is the pre­dictable ‘rot­ten apple’ defence to alle­ga­tions of impro­pri­ety. And it is sim­ply absurd to describe some of the alleged actions of those advis­ers not­ed by the Sen­ate Report — such as “forgery and dis­hon­est con­ceal­ment of mate­r­i­al facts” (Sen­ate Inquiry Exec­u­tive Sum­ma­ry, p. xvi­ii) — as mere­ly “poor advice”. If the bank can describe that as “poor advice”, then a bank rob­ber would be enti­tled to describe his pro­fes­sion as “mak­ing with­drawals”.

This is also not the only alle­ga­tion of impro­pri­ety hang­ing over the Com­mon­wealth Bank: the oth­er is the as yet unproven alle­ga­tions about its behav­iour with regard to Bankwest, which the Com­mon­wealth Bank took over from HBOS (Hal­i­fax Bank of Scot­land) in 2008. About 400 cus­tomers of Bankwest have alleged that they were forced to default on their loans, even though they were pay­ing their loan install­ments in full and on time (see also Evan Jones’detailed arti­cles on this issue).

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