The royal commission's public hearings changed this week.
The first hearings were tragically comic. Awful, dumb stuff: gym owners helping to write $122 million in loans, shonky car dealers selling lemons to hard-luck customers, a gambling addict given credit card limit increases.
But what we heard this week from senior financial institution executives was utterly shocking.
Extraordinary deception. Atrocious behaviour. No concern about consequences.
Photo: AMP chief executive Craig Meller and chairwoman Catherine Brenner at the company's annual general meeting last year. (AAP: David Moir)
This week was consequential. The political environment around the commission has changed.
The Government that blustered about the worthless nature of the probe — when it was mooted by backbench renegades and their political rivals — is now pushing legislation for increased penalties for corporate crime.
That's for down the track.
AMP's trail of blunders
For now, here's just some examples of where you — the customer — stand in the multi-billion-dollar world of financial planning and wealth management.
AMP was aware it had been charging customers "fee for no service" — money they weren't entitled to. Catherine Brenner, the chairwoman of AMP, jumped in to make changes to an apparently independent report by law firm Clayton Utz that was being prepared to give to the regulator and she asked for the chief executive's name to be taken out of it.
The email, reflecting her intention, said this: "Include a statement to the effect that [chief executive] Craig Meller was unaware of the practices or their illegality."
Think about that.
The chairwoman of a $12 billion company appearing to meddle in a report it would shop to the corporate watchdog as being an independent review of the scandal.
It gets worse: she's helping to write the rules. Ms Brenner is a member of the corporate governance committee of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.
As if that wasn't enough, AMP also admitted they made false or misleading statements to the regulator, the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) 20 times.
An internal AMP report said letting customers know they were paying junk fees could lead to calls for compensation and problems with the regulator. Taking the money was okay, but informing punters, "would be a very negative customer experience".
Even after fessing up to the regulator in the independent report, even after they'd paid back the money, AMP couldn't stop lying to their customers. A script for use in call centres showed workers were told to tell customers — asking about the refunded fees appearing in their accounts — that it was an "administrative error". It wasn't.
Dead people charged by CBA
Even death wouldn't stop the Commonwealth Bank taking fees from customers, charges it wasn't even entitled to if they'd been alive. A morbid angle to the "fee for no service" scandal, from one lucrative late customer, Australia's biggest bank took fees for a decade.
They received complaints about it for four years and sat on internal and external reports about it for two more years, before deigning to inform the regulator.
They had to pay back $118 million, out of more than $200 million in compensation from the Big Four banks and AMP on this issue.
ANZ logged 56 events of "improper conduct" in their financial planning and wealth management arm: forged signatures, impersonation of customers, fraudulent use of power of attorney, false witnessing of documents, customer's funds transferred to advisers' personal accounts. Expect more on that next week.
To finish, consider these examples from the week:
- A retired couple wanted a low-risk investment. The adviser "put them in high-risk investments" which lost their money fast. When they tried to fortress their remaining assets, the adviser couldn't be contacted … for a year
- A customer was charged premium fees for a managed investment account. Where was the money really being held? In a "zero-growth cash account for 10 years"
- Once the fee-for-no-service scandal was uncovered, one unnamed institution didn't want to refund the money they'd stolen. They wanted an "opt-in" compensation scheme. That means customers, unaware they'd had fees taken out of their account for no service, would have to "apply" to get their money back.
If you ever wondered what the institutions think of you, now you know.
Dave R.
