{"id":360035,"date":"2018-05-07T00:55:01","date_gmt":"2018-05-06T23:55:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/official-report-whitewashes-financial-crimes-by-australias-biggest-bank\/"},"modified":"2018-05-07T00:55:01","modified_gmt":"2018-05-06T23:55:01","slug":"official-report-whitewashes-financial-crimes-by-australias-biggest-bank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/official-report-whitewashes-financial-crimes-by-australias-biggest-bank\/","title":{"rendered":"Official report whitewashes financial crimes by Australia\u2019s biggest bank"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"content\">\n<h3 class=\"nomargin\">\u00a0<\/h3>\n<h2>Official report whitewashes financial crimes by Australia\u2019s biggest bank<\/h2>\n<h5>\n<p>    By<br \/>\n    Mike Head<br \/>\n    <br \/>5 May 2018<\/p>\n<\/h5>\n<p>Yet another Australian government inquiry has allowed a major bank or finance house go scot-free after systematically defrauding or fleecing millions of customers, primarily working people, retirees and small business operators.<\/p>\n<p>An Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) report this week into multiple financial crimes committed by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), the country\u2019s largest bank, recommends no punishment whatsoever.<\/p>\n<p>Instead the bank agreed to a worthless \u201cenforceable undertaking\u201d to conduct vague \u201cremedial action.\u201d This essentially means it can carry on with the rapacious activities that drove its profit to near $10 billion last year.<\/p>\n<p>The CBA will be required to keep an extra $1 billion in its capital reserve, which is an insignificant portion of its $64 billion in capital. If APRA later rules that the bank fails to implement any of its \u201cundertakings,\u201d the CBA might face fines of up to $210 million\u2014about 2 percent of its annual profit.<\/p>\n<p>The Liberal-National Coalition government commissioned the APRA report last August in a desperate attempt to prevent a wider inquiry after CBA had committed a litany of abuses for at least a decade.<\/p>\n<p>These included mis-selling margin loans to customers to invest in financial products recommended by Storm Financial, which collapsed (2008); misconduct by financial advisers in Commonwealth Financial Planning, part of CBA\u2019s wealth business (2010\u201311); fees for no service in financial advice (2012 to 2015); use of outdated definitions of heart attacks to deny insurance claims against CommInsure (2016); and misleading selling of credit card insurance (2013 to 2018).<\/p>\n<p>On top of that, in seeking&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wsws.org\/en\/articles\/2018\/05\/05\/bank-m05.html\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0 Official report whitewashes financial crimes by Australia\u2019s biggest bank By Mike Head 5 May 2018 Yet another Australian government inquiry has allowed a major bank or finance house go scot-free after systematically defrauding or fleecing millions of customers, primarily working people, retirees and small business operators. An Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) report this [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2526,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-360035","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2526"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=360035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360035\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=360035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=360035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=360035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}