Here are some revelations from the Royal Commission into banking so far:
NAB employees in Western Sydney were paid bribes of up to $2800 to wave through loans they knew were based on fake documents.
Fake payslips, IDs and Medicare cards were allegedly made up to generate loans for the bank’s “Introducer Program”, which generated $24 billion worth of home loans and paid out between $100-$150 million in commissions between 2013 and 2016.
“Money is deposited at CBA so NAB can’t detect the deposits. Happening on a daily or weekly basis and has been happening for a number of years.”
Five bankers were sacked in 2015 over the scandal. Allegedly 60 bankers were involved in activities which included falsifying loan documents, forging customers’ signatures on forms and the provision of unsuitable loans.
AMP admitted lying to ASIC for almost a decade about charging customers fees for advice they never received.
The Commonwealth Bank admitted that its advisers had been charging fees on clients who had died. One planner received about $65 a month in fees from a client who had been dead for seven years before contacting the widow, and still took “no action to fix the continuing charges”. Another planner continued charging fees for more than a decade after the client had died.
There have also been numerous revelations of banks and other financial institutions raising credit card limits for people they know are problem gamblers, selling income protection insurance to unemployed people who are unable to claim it, colluding with dodgy car sales yards to lock people into high repayments for lemons and the usual stories of people losing their homes and/or savings due to poorly regulated financial advice.
Federal minister Kelly O’Dwyer today announced that banks should not be exempt from the Government’s planned business tax cuts. This would see the CBA receive a tax cut of almost $4 billion, Westpac would receive $3.5 billion, ANZ $3.2 billion and NAB $2.6 billion.
That’ll teach em.