BFCSA Blog

Please forgive me if this has already been posted before ... Lisa     AAP  August 22, 2012 12:11AM   THE Australian Greens will move for a royal commission into whether the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) covered up evidence of bribery by its note-printing subsidiaries. The scandal was exposed in the media in mid-2009.A committal hearing in Melbourne last week heard eight former executives of the wholly RBA-owned NPA and the part-owned Securency were involved in a conspiracy to bribe public officials at foreign banks in trying to secure contracts to make plastic banknotes. But ABC Television reported on Tuesday then NPA company secretary Brian Hood detailed corruption concerns in the mid-2007 memo to then RBA deputy governor Ric Battellino. Greens banking spokesman Adam Bandt said he would move for the establishment of a full independent inquiry into the banknote bribery scandal. "The inquiry should have the powers of a royal...

By Philip Soos  Tuesday, 21 August 2012 The level of sub-prime mortgages in Australia may be far in advance of what was previously assumed and provided for by banks. The story was broken on the ABC, and covered elsewhere. The revelations centred around two personalities: Kate Thompson and Denise Brailey. Kate Thompson was a licensed mortgage broker at Mortgage Miracles in Western Australia. A highly regarded and award-winning broker, Thompson disbursed a veritable torrent of credit from bank and non-banking lenders to clients wanting funds to buy property, making around $5 million a year from upfront and trailing commissions. She is now facing fraud charges for what amounts to predatory lending: providing credit to people with little to no expectation they will be able to repay the entirety of the loan. This fraud was achieved by fudging the income and assets of clients, making them appear much wealthier on paper than was...