The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has charged ANZ Bank, Citigroup and Deutsche Bank with criminal cartel offences following an investigation. 

Senior executives John McLean, Itay Tuchman and Stephen Roberts of Citigroup, Michael Ormaechea and Michael Richardson formerly of Deutsche Bank, and Rick Moscati of ANZ have also been charged with criminal offences.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/jun/05/australian-watchd...

At age 77, suffering from diabetes and a host of other ailments, he became inmate 50444-054 — and for nine-and-a-half months until mid-2003, his registered address shifted from upscale Manhattan to a federal penitentiary in Rochester Minnesota.

Up to that point, Alfred Taubman was a jet-setting real estate and shopping mall tycoon who threw lavish parties and schmoozed with the likes of Donald Trump and Henry Kissinger after carving out a reputation as a ruthless but brilliant marketer.

He was best known, however, as the flamboyant force behind art house Sotheby's which, over the course of 20 years, he transformed from an ailing and stuffy institution into the world's premier auction house. And it was Sotheby's that would prove to be his undoing.

Taubman scored a stint in the big house for something that only recently has become a criminal offence in Australia. He was convicted of being party to a criminal cartel after Sotheby's and arch rival Christie's conspired to rig prices in the rarefied world of high end art.

But the tale of how he landed there is likely to send a chill into the murky world of Australian banking, after criminal charges were laid against six high-powered executives and three major banks in the past fortnight.

In the legal world, it is called "the flip" or "the rollover". And it has become the primary tool in anti-trust and cartel investigations globally.

It works like this: whoever comes clean first is granted immunity. As each participant is targeted, the urge to break ranks and avoid a jail sentence becomes a powerful motivating force.

There is no dispute that Christie's and Sotheby's colluded in the mid-1990s, in the wake of a global recession, to up their commission rates. How it came about and who ultimately was responsible are still contested.

The crux of the case, however, was that Christie's, which had been overtaken by Sotheby's in terms of sales, made the first approach.

After years of plodding investigation, imagine the delight of authorities when Christie's senior executive handed over a trove of documents about his dealings with his opposite number at Sotheby's, Diana Brooks.

Despite being the instigator, Christie's secured an amnesty. Under intense pressure, Brooks then grassed Taubman, her once great mentor, claiming she was acting under orders, an accusation he denied.

While she was too involved in the scam to secure immunity, Brooks at least got to spend her time at home with an ankle bracelet while Taubman went down. No-one at Christie's, meanwhile, ever saw the inside of a prison.

Collusion and cartels are notoriously difficult to prove, particularly in hugely technical areas such as investment banking and trading in obscure financial instruments.

Read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-12/art-of-the-flip:-why-bankers-have-...

Former JP Morgan Australia boss Robert Priestley has resigned from the ASX and Future Fund boards amid a court case into alleged cartel activity during an ANZ capital raising that JP Morgan was involved with.

The Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions launched criminal proceedings earlier this month against ANZ, Citigroup and Deutsche Bank, as well as six senior executives or former executives of those institutions, following an investigation by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).

The case concerns a $2.5 billion capital raising by ANZ in August, underwritten by investment banks JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank and Citi.

Around a third of the shares to be sold in the capital raising were not taken up by institutional investors, leaving the three underwriters holding a total of around $800 million worth of ANZ shares.

Read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-19/anz-cartel-case-claims-asx-board-s...

The Royal Commission established to look into misconduct by the banks has failed, particularly with the small business sector, writes Dr Evan Jones.

(Versions of this article were sent to three mainstream media outlets. There was no response.)

PRIME MINISTER Malcolm Turnbull announced the establishment of a Banking Royal Commission on 29 November 2017. Turnbull reversed his Government’s opposition after pressure from backbenchers, the Opposition and the public.

The Commission was established on 14 December. The Terms of Reference were a motley collection of admirable and potentially limiting or diverting items. Its preamble was a shocker of government self-delusion — a system “most stable”, “systemically strong”, “internationally recognised”, “world’s best”, and so on.

That and the ridiculous brevity of the Commission’s mandate looked like a Clayton’s Commission in the making. Thus the title of my series on the backdrop to the Royal Commission hearings.

The Commission’s early hearings were a surprise. There has been assertive questioning of the banking sector’s cosseted and overpaid leaders. The A.M.P. has come crashing down. Banking involvement in the corrupt franchise sector has been a revelation.

But much of the supposed shock horror exposures have already received good coverage in myriad Parliamentary inquiries and ongoing Fairfax media stories.

Beginning 21 May, the Banking Royal Commission devoted a cursory two weeks to small business lending. Cursory, because this sector has been long under the radar.

The ASBFEO Ombudsman, Kate Carnell, has expressed dismay at the brief period allocated to small business and she’s right.

Having been the regular recipient of bank victim accounts since 2000, I am atypically familiar with the banks’ modus operandi regarding its small business (and family farmer) borrowers. It is perennially ugly. I can attest that it is a sector rife with malpractice, indeed criminality.

An event with more than a whiff of malignity was the takedown of close to a thousand Bankwest commercial property borrowers after the CBA purchased Bankwest from HBOS on 19 December 2008.

Curious, then, that Counsel Assisting, Michael Hodge, should open the small business session declaiming that the foreclosed customers got the story wrong regarding the CBA’s motivation for this takedown.

The key alleged claims were that the CBA’s ultimate purchase price could be reduced by default and foreclosure of select Bankwest borrowers (“clawback”) and/or that a desired enhancement of the bank’s tier one capital adequacy ratio could similarly be achieved by such foreclosures.

Mr Hodge noted that these ulterior motives

"... allow the convenience of avoiding grappling with the risk presented by a particular borrower or industry… They therefore avoid asking how a bank might or might not legitimately respond to its perception of increased risk in respect of a particular loan or lending in a particular industry."

This characterisation could have been written by the bank itself.

The Hodge presentation was readily picked up by the Australian Financial Review and painted as the unvarnished truth and the last word.

Mr Hodge’s summary of the supposed claims is inadequate, indeed inaccurate.

Bankwest victims were forced to make inferences from the fragmentary information publicly available. Two Parliamentary inquiries (Post-GFC Banking, Impairment of Customer Loans) were impeded for having no access to the documentation. A Royal Commission is supposed to get to the bottom of things.

Read more:

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/the-royal-com...

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edelweiss whistling in the banking meadows...

Westpac's chief executive Brian Hartzer will step down in the wake of allegations the bank committed 23 million breaches of Australia's anti-money laundering laws.

• Mr Hartzer will depart the bank next week with a full year's $2.7 million salary, but with his unvested bonuses not paid
• Amongst the bank's alleged breaches is a failure to adequately monitor the accounts of a convicted child sex offender who was regularly sending money to the Philippines
• Westpac chair Lindsay Maxsted will also leave the bank in the first half of next year, while current chief financial officer Peter King takes over as acting CEO

Mr Hartzer will depart the bank on December 2, but has been given 12 months' notice and will be paid his full $2.7 million salary for the period.

However, his so-far unvested short and long-term bonuses will not be paid and he will not be eligible for any future bonuses.

Westpac was sued by the financial intelligence agency AUSTRAC, which last week applied to the Federal Court to issue fines against the bank.

Each breach could attract a civil penalty between $17 million and $21 million.

Mr Hartzer's abrupt departure follows pressure from all quarters in the wake of AUSTRAC's decision to pursue charges over the bank's deficient oversight of its anti-money laundering and terrorism financing obligations.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-26/westpac-ceo-brian-hartzer-quits-m...

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Pause for a moment, and let's take ourselves back to November 2017, when the then Turnbull government was dragged kicking and screaming to hold a royal commission into the banks.

The then treasurer Scott Morrison had been one of the most ardent resisters of a royal commission, describing it as "a stunt", "hot air" and "nothing more than crass populism seeking to undermine confidence in the banking and financial system, which is key to jobs and growth in this country".

Even when the government finally announced the royal commission, he described it as a "regrettable but necessary action".

"Politics is doing damage to our banking and financial system, and we are taking control as a government to protect the strength of our banking system through a properly constituted inquiry on these terms of reference, rather than the alternatives present in other commission of inquiry proposals," Morrison said at the time.

Fast forward to this week, when ministers in the government he leads, as senior as the Deputy Prime Minister, went on a holy war against the ANZ bank over it decision to limit its exposure to fossil fuels among its customers. 

The ANZ, as far as the Nats were concerned, had joined the culture wars about climate change.

Keep in mind that international banking regulators have been both warning banks to consider these issues and to be transparent about their exposures to possible stranded assets for some time, and that the Australian regulator, the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority, has told the banks they must report their exposures.

But this did not stop a Cabinet Minister, no less, David Littleproud, of making what could only be described — and in fact was by described so by former regulators — as a grossly reckless statement threatening to revoke government guarantees for ANZ bank deposits as revenge for its stricter climate change lending policy.

"The Nationals will review every policy lever at the Federal Government's disposal — including the availability of deposit guarantees — to protect Australian farmers from these sorts of arbitrary boardroom ideological agendas," Littleproud said.

Littleproud and the band of Nationals MPs and senators who joined the ANZ-bashing conga line seemed to have little regard for things like a bank board's obligation to make risk management decisions in the best of their shareholders, or indeed to be transparent about their actions.

But maybe that is not all that surprising. It is hard to think of a recent government which has done more to reduce transparency or frustrate inquiries into activities carried out in its name.

While the Prime Minister was prepared, in the interests of some cheap tabloid politics, to hang out the chief executive of Australia Post over a series of gifted fancy watches, no-one seems to have challenged the Australia Post board, replete with at least three former senior Liberal Party figures — former federal director Tony Nutt, former Queensland president Bruce McIver and former minister and senator Michael Ronaldson — about its responsibility and oversight of this issue.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-31/morrison-government-transparency-anz-climate-change/12832786

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BANKERS STOLE MILLIONS. HE DEFIED A COP. GUESS WHO WENT TO JAIL?

The settlement between Goldman Sachs for stealing hundreds of millions compared to the treatment of Blind Justice an activist for the disabled who refused to provide ID to a cop illustrates the vast gap between justice for the rich and everyone else.

BY TAYA GRAHAM AND STEPHEN JANIS

OCTOBER 30, 2020

Watch:

https://therealnews.com/bankers-stole-millions-he-defied-a-cop-guess-who-went-to-jail

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