Banking

THE Australian Securities and Investment Commission has issued the results of its investigations into Australian banks, concerning the extraction of fees from customers for services that were never provided.

Meanwhile, the New Zealand (Australianowned) banks ‘‘earned’’ record profits amounting to billions of dollars which cost New Zealand customers on average $416 each.

The ASIC listed 76 recommendations for change, among them the creation of a compensation and remediation scheme for the banking industry’s victims that could top $6 billion. It also recommended that at least two of the institutions involved should be made liable for criminal prosecution.

A separate investigation by the Reserve Bank into practices in the banks here claimed to find no such misbehaviour, but a press release by Finance Minister Grant Robertson responding to the Australian report looks to me like a whitewash of our

New Zealand banks.

Until our Government conducts an inquiry as stringent as the Australian inquiry, my guess is that we will never know the truth, or the cost to their customers or to New Zealand.

Dennis Dorney

Calton Hill

[Abridged]