Pressuring the Banking Royal Commission To Make Waves

by Malcolm R Hughes

The final report of Australia’s Royal Commission into Banking, Financial Services, and the Superannuation Industry contained some unusually straight talk. For example, the sole commissioner, The Honourable Justice Kenneth Madison Hayne AC QC, wrote:

“I was not persuaded that NAB [National Australia Bank] is willing to accept the necessary responsibility for deciding, for itself, what is the right thing to do, and then having its staff act accordingly.”

But I and many other citizens were very disappointed to find that the Report did not recommend any prosecutions. I thus wrote to Senator Ketter to point out that persons – such as the members of his committee – who know of crimes but fail to report them to police can themselves be charged with misprision.

Background

The Royal Commission, agreed to in December 2017 when Scott Morrison was Treasurer and Malcolm Turnbull was Prime Minister, was a response to Labor and Greens pressure. You may be amazed to hear that 10,000 persons made submissions to this RC. And 130 witnesses were called. The Final Report was tabled in Parliament in February 2019.

Below I’ll list the crimes about which I emailed the federal Senate. And then I will have something to say about – what else – Port Arthur. Specifically about allegations of the Commonwealth Bank’s involvement in the 1996 Tasmanian tragedy.

The CEC – Citizen’s Electoral Council

As Gumshoe readers know, I am often up-in-arms about the skullduggery of the bankers and the impact their crimes have on farmers and Australians generally. A minor political party, the CEC – Citizen’s Electoral Commission – has been pushing for change to banking laws.

Before the recent election Senator Pauline Hanson presented a bill called Banking System Reform (Separation of Banks). A similar one had been presented by Bob Katter in 2018 but was never debated.

It was by reading advice from the CEC that I got the idea to make a submission to the Royal Commission. I did so on the RC’s website, and do not have a copy.

The Big Four

None of Australia’s Big Four Banks came out smelling like a rose. ANZ was accused of not accurately verifying the living expenses of home loan customers who were referred to ANZ by mortgage brokers. ANZ said this was the job of the brokers, but of course that would entail a conflict of interest.

The Royal Commission also identified $90 million as being attributable to ANZ’s charging home loan customers the wrong interest rate.

As for the Commonwealth Bank of Australia – once a publicly owned entity like Qantas and Telecom –Commissioner Hayne said CBA was “economical with the truth” in failing to tell customers how much commission it is paying to mortgage brokers (a lot!). At the hearings it emerged that the CBA rewarded brokers for encouraging customers to enter into larger home loans, and for longer periods than necessary.

Regarding National Australia Bank, the RC said:

“there were unsuitable loans, there was false documentation, there was dishonest application of customers’ signatures on consent forms and there was the misstatement of some loans in loan documentation. All of those things occurred, did they not?” “NAB’s Mark Waldron agreed that conduct was fraudulent and beyond misconduct; “Yes, we can now say that they have occurred.”

It was also reported that NAB employees in NSW accepted bribes in order to facilitate loans they knew were based on false documentation in order to reach the company’s lending targets.

From the Final Report:

“A whistleblower claimed that there was a volatile, toxic and Machiavellian culture within NAB [and] NAB were also implicated in impropriety in foreign exchange trading.”

And Westpac? They were “implicated in allegations that it rigged one of Australia’s key interest rates, the bank bill swap rate… [and] Following ASIC investigations, Westpac was instructed to make a donation of $3 million to Financial Literacy Australia after ASIC found that the bank’s employees disclosed confidential details of their clients’ orders to other foreign exchange traders. Westpac refunded $65 million to 220,000 customers after it failed to pass on benefits they should have received under package deals, including home loans, credit cards and transaction accounts, offered by the bank.”

Misprision

Now for my complaint, which is that the RC did not nominate any person for prosecution. This is ridiculous. The breaches of ethics may take the spotlight off crimes but we can put the spotlight back on the crimes.

I emailed Senator Hume saying that the Big Four committed crimes and must be subjected to law.

The two charges I would like to see laid are Fraud and Conspiracy.

On of the frauds consisted of putting in fictitious “living expenses” information to loan applications. This meant person would get loans they could not afford and his would mean early foreclosures.

The conspiracy, I said, must have taken place by agreement among all the banks. How else would they have come up with the same con job?

I did not hesitate to point out that the senators themselves were now up for a charge. They have committed the crime of misprision, a Blackstonian crime that Mary Maxwell at Gumshoe loves to preach about. This is a quote from the case of Branzburg v Hayes, US 1972:

“In England, beginning in the thirteenth century the failure to report a crime became itself a crime. According to tradition it was a citizen’s duty to “raise the hue and cry” by reporting crimes, especially felonies, to law enforcement authorities.”

In 1990 New South Wales changed the name of the crime of misprision to “concealing serious indictable offence,” but the gist of it is still there. Section 316 of the Crimes Act NSW 1990 says:

(“1) If a person has committed a serious indictable offence and another person who knows or believes that the offence has been committed and that he or she has information which might be of material assistance in securing the apprehension of the offender or the prosecution or conviction of the offender for it fails without reasonable excuse to bring that information to the attention of a member of the Police Force or other appropriate authority, that other person is liable to imprisonment for 2 years.”

Each of these possible crimes (fraud and conspiracy) have been pointed out to the members of the Senate Economics Committee by your humble servant. As I said to Senator Ketter:

“The warning of the possibility of the charge of misprision of felony, or its replacement, Section 316, against each of those committee people, if they do not present above crimes [fraud and conspiracy]to the Public Prosecutor, has been declared.” [Bolding added!]

Port Arthur

Finally, to that other matter. I learned from Keith Noble’s book, Mass Murder [free download], that Stewart Beattie had pointed to a possible identification of 6 ASIO persons either in the Broad Arrow Café, or outside at the Port Arthur Historic Site, during the 1996 massacre that is blamed on Martin Bryant.

One nominee is Anthony Nightingale, another (unverified) is Lynne Beavis. At the time, she was ostensibly employed by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and – as I said to the Senate Committee – there is a rumor that she received a payout of $900,000 by her employer for what she suffered that day.

The massacre took place on a Sunday, which is not a CBA workday. Was she on holiday – as she claims – or was she working? If working, in the location of the massacre – did she have a role to play?

If on holiday, no worker’s compensation is payable. I consider then, that this is case of fraud against the Commonwealth Bank Compensation Fund.