‘Law-breaking on a grand scale’: Court told CBA failed to disclose non-compliance to investors

The emails included messages between Ian Narev, the bank’s chief executive at the time, and Matt Comyn, who was head of the retail bank at the time and is now the chief executive.

They discussed the discovery of an issue in which large transactions made through intelligence deposit machines (IDMs) – a type of ATM that allows anonymous cash deposits – had not been reported to AUSTRAC for several years. CBA was required to make “threshold transaction reports” to AUSTRAC within 10 business days of any transactions that involved the transfer of physical currency over $10,000.

“It goes without saying we need to take this extremely seriously,” Narev wrote in an email on September 6. “I have let [chief risk officer] Alden [Toevs] know he should personally be in touch with AUSTRAC about this and offer up a discussion with me. We need to adopt a similarly senior posture with AFP.

“Whilst this is the result of unintentional coding errors, the circumstances warrant very senior oversight … The absolute priority here is effective stakeholder management.”

Comyn replied: “I’ve also put a rocket up a few people because there are still some details that we need before we can accurately update stakeholders with the facts.”

Stoljar argued that the term stakeholders included investors, who he said would have been concerned that CBA had contravened money laundering legislation more than 50,000 times.

Loading

“What we draw from this is that the actual reaction of the most senior persons at the bank on discovering this issue is totally in contrast with the case which is now being sought to be put; a case by CBA, a case which seeks to minimise this issue and says that information of this kind was simply not material,” Stoljar said.

“CBA’s most senior officers regarded it as, not just serious, but extremely serious. They were concerned about it enough to say it needed senior oversight. The stakeholders were concerned, or they believed they would be concerned. The regulator had serious concerns.

“CBA’s case seemed to be that, unlike all the persons that I’ve just mentioned, the investors of Australia were, or would have been, quite uninterested and not at all perturbed about these serious and multiple contraventions of the money laundering legislation.”

Stoljar said when the contraventions were made public the response was “universal and unanimous”, referring to an article in The Australian Financial Review, which outlined how the share price had fallen and $5 billion had been wiped from CBA’s market capitalisation after AUSTRAC announced legal proceedings.

He said the question at the heart of the class action was whether the information that CBA had been late in reporting large transactions to AUSTRAC would be likely to influence investment decisions.

“The answer is, well, it was law-breaking on a grand scale. Of course, it would,” he said.

A CBA spokesman said that the bank vigorously denies the allegations and is defending the actions.

The Business Briefing newsletter delivers major stories, exclusive coverage and expert opinion. Sign up to get it every weekday morning.