ASIC tallies Westpac’s responsible lending law breaches
The Australian 12:00am May 7, 2019
Anthony Klan
Westpac broke responsible lending laws more than 260,000 times in just over three years, the corporate watchdog had told the Federal Court in Sydney this morning.
Lawyers for the Australian Securities & Investments Commission said between December 2011 and March 2015, Westpac engaged in a “systematic approach” of ignoring the living expenses loan applicants had stated on application forms. Instead it relied on broad living expense “benchmarks”, which, if they were true, would in some cases have meant the loan applicant was already living on, or close to, the poverty line, ASIC told the court.
ASIC said Westpac failed to properly verify the actual financial positions of borrowers a total of 261,987 times.
In 154,351 of those cases, the bank also failed to use correct figures when assessing if borrowers taking out interest-only loans could...