This is appalling conduct but could have been, and still may be rife. Does shopping around help when the insurers were and might still be able to rort their customers and skirt their obligations? This is the Suncorp installment.
The penalty described at the end of this one, what could be written?
He also said, “We failed the Heald family and for that I’m sincerely sorry to the Healds for the impact on them”.
Earlier in the day the commission heard that Suncorp had paid fines to ASIC of $42,300 over misleading advertising when a penalty as high as $7.2 million could have been levied.
Board of Directors
Michael Cameron. Managing Director & CEO.
Audette Exel AO. Non-executive Director.
Sally Herman. Non-executive Director.
Simon Machell. Non-executive Director.
Christine McLoughlin. Chairman & Non-executive Director.
Dr Douglas McTaggart. Non-executive Director.
Lindsay Tanner. Non-executive Director.
Sylvia Falzon.
Five of the ten executive leadership team are also women.
Is there a suggestion that all of Suncorp’s problems before the RC were due to a lack attendance of the women at the executive lunch meetings?
Possibly there is a conflict of interest between male executives who lead as men and female executives who need to also lead like men to get the job, but really would prefer to lead more like a woman.
Is the evidence before the RC compelling a change to how be lead and to more appropriate quality of leadership? This is not intended as a question on political will. It is a social and moral question.
p.s. $42k might also be a return first class airfare anywhere in the world with spending money.
An telling example.
While one driver for the behavior’s evident before the RC may be to limit compensation and ensure profit, is there another risk here?
I had a company use vehicle that was badly damaged in a collision approx 12 months before HIH went belly up. Rather than write the vehicle off it was repaired at great expense, except not everything was fixed and it carried many defects forward. No joy with any of those issues. That HIH took forever to settle on a repairer was a warning sign. That they argued about the extent of the work required and did not accept subsequent defects is also telling, although after they folded it was not relevant. That the vehicle was only 6 months old made every subsequent issue a problem as the warranty provisions were always debated.
HIH failed due to management decisions which it appeared in my example to be trying to offset by screwing down on claims.
How can anyone be assured that aggressive and tardy behaviour by a major insurer are not symptoms of a business set to fail? The statutory regulators have been asleep for a long time. Nothing has changed?
And yet again the failure of the oversight organisations to really cause the management and boards of these businesses pain so as to mend their ways. $42 K you would think barely if at all cover the cost of the legal team to take the action in the first place.
Really just another “let’s be seen to be doing something when in fact we don’t want to” outcome with a fine that would barely register at all.
