Westpac too busy to dob in planner
A WESTPAC executive said the bank was too busy to tell the corporate cop about a shonky financial planner, even though it had started paying back the planner’s victims, the royal commission heard.
Counsel assisting the commission Rowena Orr said the adviser, Andrew Smith, was first flagged in May 2015 and the bank started paying back customers by July.
“But it took until November to tell the regulator?” she asked Westpac’s national head of BT finance Michael Wright.
“I do acknowledge it feels like a long time, there was a lot going on,” Mr Wright said as the reason for keeping the regulator in the dark.
Ms Orr yesterday also confronted Mr Wright with the revelation Westpac had refused to give a bad reference to Mr Smith, after he quit the bank because of his poor performance.
This was despite Westpac investigating him for “serious misconduct” and interest from the corporate cop.
Despite the company, Dover financial planners, pleading multiple times with Westpac to know if Mr Smith had done anything wrong, the bank refused, citing a policy not to speak on former staff. Mr Smith was hired by Dover six weeks after leaving Westpac and is still registered as a financial adviser.
Meanwhile, Ms Orr also yesterday revealed how an ANZ state development manager was ignored when she blew the whistle on a dodgy planner, saying he should be let go. Instead the planner got a “letter of censure” and continued giving bad advice.
The adviser, Christopher Harris, had already been detected for poor advice when he placed an elderly widow into an inappropriate investment, Ms Orr said.
Ms Orr said ANZ had a number of problems with financial planners, revealing in 2013 it had splashed out big payments to sign up financial advisers that worked for a failing financial advice firm being investigated by the corporate cop.
The commission heard ANZ desperately wanted to get its hands on the hundreds of millions of dollars of clients money under management which could earn commissions and other fees.