BFCSA Blog

omment is free 'In corrupt systems, decent people have two options: conform or be crushed' According to Vince Cable, the emergence of a new breed of 'decent' bankers will guard against further financial outrages. But until we recognise that the system itself is flawed, banks will go on turning ordinary workers into shameless shysters and get-rich-quick merchants Share150   Email Fintan O'Toole The Observer, Saturday 30 June 2012 21.00 BST Jump to comments (85) Allied Irish Bank, where whistle-blowers were either dismissed or marginalised. Photograph: Peter Morrison/AP Spivs! Wideboys! Riverboat gamblers! Snakeoil salesmen! Calling the shysters by their proper names is satisfying – and it may be the only satisfaction the public will get. But it is also, oddly enough, rather naive. For it assumes that better, more decent people wouldn't end up manipulating interest rates or mis-selling financial products. All the evidence from the many scandals of recent years is that...

0 0 0 Economic References Committee, PO Box 6100, Parliament House, Canberra ACT 2600 28th May,2012   Excerpts taken from Submission 37.    Background My name is Trevor James Eriksson aged 65 years. I have held senior executive positions in a public listed companies, owned and operated a management consulting business which focused on the financial sector ( eg: consulted for the World Bank which included a review of the financial sector in Indonesia) since 1995. In addition to my management consultancy business., I have been associated with residential, commercial and industrial property development and investment for over twenty years.     Bankwest/ Commonwealth Bank of Australia defaulted my company, sold all real estates assets including that of the guarantors and issued Bankruptcy Notice on myself. Bankwest created a default by under valuing real estate security and claiming that I had not returned loan documents thus there was no contact to...

SUBMISSION TO SENATE INQUIRY Sub. 29.    May 2012 Dear Senators, Please find attached my submission that relates to how my business was treated by Bankwest. My business was a family business in the small country town of Forbes in NSW. It was created by my grandfather in 1913, which would of made it 100 years old next year. We were a Painting Contracting company. In 1999 we won a contract to maintain a lot of public schools in western NSW. This was the break we had worked hard for. Within 5 years we went from 5 workers to about 70 workers. This enabled us to tender for other contracts in other areas and in the 5 year period we worked across NSW for such companies as NRMA,TARGET and TRANSFIELD and as well as painting we also started to do building maintenance and insurance works. Life was good.   We were with...

  by Paul Barry The Monthly | The Monthly Essays | February 2011 | By mid March, America’s champion fraudster Bernie Madoff will have served two years of a 150-year prison sentence for stealing billions of dollars from his rich and famous investors. As he chalks up the anniversary on his North Carolina jail wall, our corporate cop, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), will have barely begun its action against Australia’s champion wealth destroyer Storm Financial Ltd, whose reckless advice cost 3000–4000 investors in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria around $3 billion. Yet these financial collapses happened at almost exactly the same time: Bernie Madoff was led away in handcuffs in December 2008, just as Storm’s banks pulled the plug on the big Townsville-based financial planner and its unfortunate clients. There are, of course, huge differences between the two cases, not least that Bernie Madoff pleaded guilty and...