Criminal cartel case against ANZ, investment banks heading to trial.
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Insurance companies are reneging on paying out on coronavirus claims agains their business interruption polices.
What a surprise. Not.
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Some good news:
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Another “happy” bank customer.
The process is led and defined by the good old US of A. For themselves, FATCA, for money laundering FinCEN, as the models. Any country having banks in the USA is obligated to follow suit or have their banks’ US offices and US businesses as well as ‘US persons’ accounts closed - yet still subject to potential prosecution if they get caught doing the wrong things (as the US sees it).
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This one should be interesting to follow.
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‘vatcoin’ ?
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Oops…seems Austrac has revised their figure. It is now $9.5 million!
More than $2 billion out.
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It’s easy to be cynical or jocular about this but those are some serious errors.
AUSTRAC claimed $2.3 billion … actual figure: $9.5 million
AUSTRAC claimed 47,000 transactions … actual figure: 362 transactions
AUSTRAC is now claiming “a computer coding mistake”.
That’s not good enough. If AUSTRAC is going to extract billion dollar fines from our banks (really from us) then the public needs to have confidence that those allegations are accurate. AUSTRAC needs to explain publicly and fully how this error occurred. Otherwise the next time AUSTRAC is making allegations, everyone should rightly wonder whether those too are “science fiction”.
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“Computer says no”?
How on earth did anybody senior sign off on the release of the data without having it thoroughly audited? Making such an accusation in public is beyond folly unless it has been checked and re-checked.
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Particularly as the amount is such a “science fiction” amount.
AUSTRAC was claiming that approximately 75% of the Vatican’s entire budget was being siphoned off and transferred to Australia, repeatedly for 6 years, and noone in the Vatican ever noticed.
It’s nice to think that the Vatican is looking after us poor Aussies but … nah.
It would be a big story if it were true.
“extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” (Carl Sagan)
Even checked and re-checked, it is arguable that the claim should not have been made public until it is proven in a court of law, at which time hopefully the court process would have uncovered AUSTRAC’s huge error.
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I bet Comm Bank and Westpac are kicking themselves now for self reporting and accepting their big fines. From now on financial institutions may well be saying to Austrac, show us your data. Prove it.
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Tasmania to legislate a Farm Debt Mediation Scheme.
Too late for victims like Dimity and Michael Hirst.
It will be interesting to see the detail.
I hope it is better than the COVID rent deferment program which has received some media attention down here due to it being abused by some renters…a way or getting a property free of rent. Some tenants have used the holiday period and then left/getting evicted when asked to start paying rents when the holiday period ceases.
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The grubby insurance companies continue to play hard ball with Business Interuption claims.
Is there an element of hypocrisy on both sides though?
Still complaining about “the fine print” but this time the roles are reversed.
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I wouldn’t say grubby…more forgetting to check legislation listed in their T&Cs a not realising that a piece of legislation has been superceded with a new one.
We received the email spray from Clayton Utz…and looks like they even agree that the intent of the T&Cs is to exclude a pandemic, but are testing a technicality as the listed legislation has been replaced and no longer current. It will be a test case for anything quoting legislation, if the legislation isn’t current or has been replaced. I wonder if the intent or a technical error/oversight on updating T&Cs will take precedence. Interesting to watch if it does proceed.
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It will be interesting to see which way the courts go but the sensible thing would be to amend the policy now regardless of the final outcome of this case. (That won’t avoid the existing liability but will stem the losses.)
Suggestions:
- small but messy policy amendment: cover the possibility that the Act gets superseded by including language like “or any similar Act” - which would leave it to a court to determine whether the successor to the Quarantine Act is “similar” to it (and also covers the possibility that new Acts are introduced without repealing earlier Acts)
- larger but cleaner policy amendment: just exclude all government action - there is no reason why insurance companies should cover government action - it is up to government to choose whether or not to pay for the consequences of its own actions - and government is much better able to afford such costly consequences if it chooses to pay up
I’ll have $1 on the court’s ultimately siding with “technical interpretation” i.e. insurance companies lose. 
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Westpac cops another smack down.
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