Australia's Banking Royal Commission is a farce. Too big to face justice
The Untouchables.
It's no secret that the banksters much like the famous Al Capone are unethical money hungry mega powers that operate for profit and greed rather than the publics best interest and much like Capone those in power with a duty to stop him and his criminal behavior were either paid off not to or powerless to stop him because he was insulated from his crimes in much the same way corporate entity laws insulate those banksters from their crimes.
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If you don't live in Australia you're forgiven for not being aware that the Australian Government launched a Royal Commision into banking ethics and business practices this might sound like a government actually doing its job, like they actually cared about banking misconduct but to put it in perspective they have been squashing proposals for this since 2014.
It's not really that surprising that banks are untouchable first money is power, second banks hold their customer's hostage against major government sanctions and fines, and third because corporations are essentially "people" in the eyes of the law it's not the executive or the Ceo or the board that are at fault its the institution.
Revolving Door.
Photo by Craig Whitehead on Unsplash
We see it over and over again lobbyists become politicians, politicians become lobbyists, bankers become politicians and politicians become bankers.
Take 2015 for example which saw a former banking executive and former defendant in a separate insurance Royal Commision Mr. Malcom Turnbull become Prime Minister of Australia, backed up by former HSBC banking executive Mike Baird as NSW Premier while in New Zealand had former Merrill Lynch executive as their Prime Minister these are just a few examples out of that I am sure are many many that could be found.
Is it any surprise that a Royal Commission was rejected for so long when politicians don't want to bite the had of their past or future employers.
The Royal Commission: I see dead people.
It's amazing to discover what bank are doing if you actually care to look and just like Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense these banks see dead people.
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AMP
Charging the dead, that's right this bank was caught issuing charges to dead people for financial advice but wait there is more they also charged thousands of dead people life insurance premiums despite knowing those customers had died.
NAB
Bank staff accepted cash-stuffed envelopes as bribes to wave through loans they knew to be based on fraudulent documents including, fake payslips, id, in order to beat targets and net extra bonuses for themselves and their bosses by using fake docs they had taken one customer's lending capacity from $450,000 AUD to $800,000 sounds like a quick way to build or buy a property for the bank to repossess and sell for profit.
ANZ
Literally financed a sugar cane plantation that forcibly relocated families, employed child labor and was found to fail basic human rights standards.
Oh yeah, these guys are also in on the charging fees for no service including to the dead.
NAB
More dead people.
Westpac.
Make it rain, for like 8 years these guys haven't even been taking the time to properly assess customer for lending capacity, overloading Australian families and giving them impossible loans and surprise, surprise charging dead people.
Combank
DEAD PEOPLE
Collecting Scalps
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Yes I know that talking about scalping is culturally insensitive but I'm quoting here, it seems like every other day that the royal commision, the media, and various politicians are patting themselves on the back for claiming a "Scalp" what they mean by this is not that someone has been held accountable for their actions, not that someone is in jail for overseeing the theft of millions and millions of dollars from dead people but that some CEO or other executive has resigned from his or her role and probably been given what is known as a golden handshake from doing so.
In case you unaware of the golden handshake its essentially a massive, often millions of dollars payout to a CEO that loses their job for doing exactly what the board wanted them to do but pretending that it was all their fault.
Remember that revolving door from literally just above well here is the best example so far when NAB CEO Andrew Thorburn was "scapled" by the Royal Commision the very first person NAB called on and employed was Mike Baird yep the same former HSBC executive turned premier is now turning back to banking.
How to tell the Royal Commision is just posturing.
Money Laundering, funding terrorists, human traffickers, and drug cartels.
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In 2017 Commbank was found to have been in breach of its international legislative requirements in regards to anti-money laundering / counter-terrorisn financing reporting.
When a business fails in this duty they are essentially allowing their business to facilitate the purchase of bullets and guns, funding human trafficking, and letting drug cartels clean their dirty money made from products that destroy lives and families.
So just how bad did they fail their job.
- Failure to report or report on time 53,506 cash transactions exceeding $10,000.
- Failure to monitor 778,370 accounts for money laundering red flags.
- Failure to report 149 Suspicious matter reports.
- Failure to monitor 80 known suspicious accounts
- 14 occasions of failure of its risk assessments
Commonwealth bank admits that these failures has lead to "millions of dollars of suspected money laundering" while Austrac suspects that "significant further undetected money laundering through CBA accounts that ought to have been detected and reported"
Cocked up bad.
The volume of those failures above could have seen the bank fined 1 Trillion dollars anyone care to guess how much they are actually going to pay right in the middle of a Royal Commision that has shown the governments failure of any real action against the banks... $700 million.
Now I know $700 million is a bloody big number in fact its the largest corporate fine ever in Australia but let me put those two numbers next to each other.
Actual Fine $700,000,000
0.07% WTF
How bulletproof does this make the banks? Well, also in 2017 the gaming and wagering company Tabcorp was found to have breached reporting requirements just 108 times getting themselves a $45 million fine making Tabcorps cost per breach $416,666, now, compare that to Combanks cost per breach of $13,082.
Let's just pretend that the bank was going to get the same treatment as Tabcorp.
Hostages their Greatest Defense
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Again let's look at Combank looking at their annual report 2017 they have 16.6 million customer accounts that the life savings and funds of 66% of Australians, they hold a balance on home loans of around $485 billion, and hold around $221 billion dollars of debt over the heads of small and corporate business.
Those figures above are just a small section of one of the big fours debt power, the Banking Royal commision made note that many of the offenses should or at least could cause the canceling of all these banks finance license just there is no possible to pull that trigger without destroying Australian families and business.
WE ARE HOSTAGE.
Kind regards
Peter Shai
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Doesn't surprise me in the least, we have the same stuff going on here in the USA. Plus the money these banks are loaning doesn't even exist and is created by the use of double entry bookkeeping.
The they have the nerve to charge interest on top if to boot. Any country that has a central bank is in on this so it shouldn't come as any surprise if the media would actually do their job and report things instead of turning a blind eye or just flat out hiding the facts that they know.
Right on the money! (pun intended). In my opinion, the best way to beat the banks is to avoid using them as much as possible. Let's hear it for crypto and credit unions!
In the UK we used to have a very strong building society sector. The main difference between a bank and a building society is that banks are mostly privately owned, by shareholders (or nationally owned, and controlled by those politicians who used to be bankers), while building societies are mutually-owned - in other words, owned by the very people who invest in them.
During the 1990s, most building societies were changed into banks as a series of "carpet-baggers" forced through votes on the issue, and most of the investors short-sightedly voted for these institutions to become banks, tempted by the bonus of a cash windfall. Now there are very few building societies remaining, with hardly any of those in Scotland, where I live. So most people take their mortgage out with a bank.
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I actually think that the recession of 2008 was constructed to put people even further under the control of the banksters. I certainly didn't think that was the case at the time, and I became very interested in economics, genuinely looking for ways that we could get out of the financial mess, following popular economists on Twitter and joining in online discussions on the subject.
Then I started to realise that what seemed like the most sensible ways to get the economy moving again were not actually being followed. And I also found out about crypto!
I think the whole recession thing backfired and that instead of making people more enslaved to the banks, it made most people more suspicious of them.
Oh, and Royal Commissions usually serve the purpose of preventing any further investigations into the issue and keeping the most important stuff out of the public domain.
I think one of the largest problems is the people, most of us aren't informed, don't care to be informed even when information is available, then even if we are informed of major crimes our apathy and lack of empathy prevent any real outrage.
Unless it affects us we don't care if they charged dead people, or funded drug runners and terrorists and the banks no we are lazy and that chances are we won't take the time to leave them even if we think they did wrong.
It also get suspicious when you realize that Australia's big four banks are near majority-owned by another big 4 43-48% of each of our big 4 is owned by hsbc, national nominies, citigroup, and bloody JP morgan
I think of it like when big car companies make product recalls, for example, they don't do it when they know that their product is unsafe and killing people they only do it when the potential costs of legal action exceed sales value, the banks will continue bad behavior as long as the value is greater than the cost and until we can jail bankers there is no real cost.
It's a disgusting situation, and you're right, it is apathy. I think the recession jolted a lot of people out of their apathy, but maybe not enough.
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Sadly, this is too true. Lower level employees will be fired and scapegoated as rogue employees when all they were doing were applying the rules and incentives that were set from higher up. If anyone at the top does get done, they will be punished with a slightly smaller payout that will still be huge... And soon after offered a lucrative 'job' elsewhere. It stinks, we all know it, but it so hard to change it.... And after change, it always happens again... Yeah for human nature!
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Great post. A few things have been turned up lately but the big question is whether we will see any real change. Maybe a few scapegoats, a few thrown under the bus and a few golden handshakes before business as usual recommences and everyone forgets.
Nice job shining some light on what has become a systemic problem in Australia.
A well researched and delivered post Shai-hulud. Resteemed. SirKnight.
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How can you tell who is a banker from a corporate executive in a boardroom meeting?
You can't.
They all wear ski masks.
Namaste, JaiChai